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We live in a war-like society; one that supports, and is in league with, the world’s number one terrorist threat: the United States of America. Corporate media propaganda plays a key role in keeping things that way.

Ten years ago this month, the US, UK and France attacked oil-rich Libya under the fictitious cover of ‘humanitarian intervention’. The bombing was ‘justified’ by Barack Obama, David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy by the supposed imminent massacre of civilians in Benghazi by forces under Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. As we have documented previously, the propaganda claims were fraudulent.

Libya, previously a wealthy state with free health care and education, was essentially destroyed. An estimated 600,000 Libyans were killed. Many more were displaced from their homes. In the barbarous conditions of the failed state, black people have been ethnically ‘cleansed’, lynched and auctioned off as slaves, illicit arms transfers and terrorism have become rife, and many Libyans have attempted to flee to better lives across the Mediterranean, thousands of them drowning en route.

As Jeremy Kuzmarov, managing editor of CovertAction Magazine and author of four books on US foreign policy, pointed out recently, the powerful Western perpetrators of this human calamity have never been brought to justice. He added:

‘In hindsight, it is clear that the U.S. was completing a 40-year regime change operation targeting Colonel Qaddafi for which media disinformation was pivotal.

‘It is important today as such to revisit the 2011 war so that U.S. citizens can learn from the history and not be duped again into supporting an intervention of this kind.’

The Stunning Silences Over Syria And Venezuela

But, when it came to Syria several years later, media disinformation was once again pivotal in unleashing Western firepower. As we have described in numerous media alerts, the corporate media declared with instant unanimity and certainty that Syria’s President Bashar Assad was responsible for a chemical weapons attack on the Damascus suburb of Douma on 7 April, 2018. One week later, the US, UK and France attacked Syria in response to the unproven allegations. Since then, there has been a mounting deluge of evidence that the UN’s Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) has perpetrated a massive cover-up to preserve the Western narrative that Assad gassed civilians in Douma.

Earlier this month, five former OPCW officials joined a group of prominent signatories to urge the UN chemical weapons watchdog to address the controversy. Aaron Maté, an independent journalist with The Grayzone website, has been following developments closely since the beginning (see his in-depth article, ‘Did Trump Bomb Syria on False Grounds?’).

He noted that:

‘Leaks from inside the OPCW show that key scientific findings that cast doubt on claims of Syrian government guilt were censored, and that the original investigators were removed from the probe. Since the cover-up became public, the OPCW has shunned accountability and publicly attacked the two whistleblowers who challenged it from inside.’

In an interview, Maté pointed out the remarkable silence from the corporate media:

‘the western media, across the spectrum, has buried this story – which is pretty incredible. You have extraordinary allegations of a cover-up, you have whistleblowers; and not only…do you have allegations, you have documents – a trove of documents released by WikiLeaks.’

We have observed a similar shameful silence in the UK, including BBC News; even after initial interest in the ‘important story’ had been expressed by Lyse Doucet, the BBC’s chief international correspondent.

But Western violence against other nations, and the ‘justifications’ trotted out to defend ‘our’ crimes, or simply ignoring them, has become normalised in ‘mainstream’ journalism.

Consider the case of Venezuela, harbouring one of the largest oil reserves on the planet, and which, as a left-leaning democracy, has long been targeted by the US for regime change. This was seen very clearly when the late Hugo Chávez was the Venezuelan president – temporarily deposed in a failed US-supported coup in 2002, and who was often wrongly described by corporate media as a ‘dictator’ – and continues today under Chávez’s successor, Nicolás Maduro.

As John McEvoy observed in a piece for Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting, a recent UN rebuke of crippling US and European sanctions on Venezuela has been met with ‘stunning silence’.

McEvoy wrote:

‘The report laid bare how a years-long campaign of economic warfare has asphyxiated Venezuela’s economy, crushing the government’s ability to provide basic services both before and during the Covid-19 pandemic.’

According to Alena Douhan, the UN special rapporteur on the negative impact of unilateral coercive measures on the enjoyment of human rights, the Venezuelan government’s revenue was reported to have shrunk enormously, ‘with the country currently living on 1% of its pre-sanctions income,’ impeding ‘the ability of Venezuela to respond to the Covid-19 emergency.’

Douhan urged US and European governments:

‘to unfreeze assets of the Venezuela Central Bank to purchase medicine, vaccines, food, medical and other equipment.’

The US-led campaign to overthrow the Venezuelan government, Douhan added, ‘violates the principle of sovereign equality of states and constitutes an intervention in domestic affairs of Venezuela that also affects its regional relations’.

Almost exactly two years ago, we noted in a media alert that the US-based Center for Economic and Policy Research, a respected thinktank, had published a study showing that US sanctions imposed on Venezuela in August 2017 had since caused around 40,000 deaths. With the exception of a single piece in the Independent, there was zero coverage in the national UK press, and no BBC News coverage at all, as far as we could ascertain.

McEvoy wrote:

‘By omitting the devastating impact of sanctions, corporate media attribute sole responsibility for economic and humanitarian conditions to the Venezuelan government, thereby using the misery provoked by sanctions to validate the infliction of even more misery.’

He continued:

‘Loath to abandon belief in the fundamentally benign nature of Western foreign policy, corporate scribes have typically presented the devastating effects of sanctions as a mere accusation of Nicolás Maduro’.

This is a pattern of deception seen over and over again. For example, in 2002-2003, the ‘mainstream’ media repeatedly attributed claims that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction to Saddam Hussein. Doing so buried the evidence-backed testimony of senior UN weapons inspectors concluding that Iraq had been ‘fundamentally disarmed’ of 90-95 per cent of its weapons of mass destruction by December 1998. (Scott Ritter and William Rivers Pitt, ‘War On Iraq’, Profile Books, 2002, p.23)

McEvoy noted that the Guardian’s reporting of Venezuela sticks to the Washington script:

‘Often, they fail to mention sanctions at all. In June 2019, for instance, the Guardian’s Tom Phillips reported that “more than 4 million Venezuelans have now fled economic and humanitarian chaos,” citing would-be coup leader Juan Guaidó’s claim that the country’s economic collapse “was caused by the corruption of this regime,” without making any reference to Washington’s campaign of economic warfare.

‘Keeping with tradition, Douhan’s damning report has been met with stunning silence by establishment media outlets. Neither the Guardian, New York Times, Washington Post nor BBC reported on Douhan’s findings’.

Imagine if Russia had been responsible for imposing sanctions on another country, violating that country’s sovereignty, with tens of thousands dead and many more lives at risk in the months to come. Imagine, moreover, that Russia had been condemned in a hard-hitting UN report for engaging in economic warfare, described as ‘a violation of international law’ that was causing a serious ‘growth of malnourishment in the past 6 years with more than 2.5 million people being severely food insecure.’ Imagine that such a report pointed to the ‘devastating effect of unilateral sanctions on the broad scope of human rights, especially the right to food, right to health, right to life, right to education and right to development.’ The headlines and in-depth coverage in the West would be incessant. The Russian ambassador in London would be given a stern dressing-down by the UK Foreign Secretary. MPs would address Parliament, condemning Putin in the strongest possible terms. There would be global demands for the UN to intervene.

The ideological discipline required to ignore such crimes under Western policy is remarkable, but it is standard in the corporate media system. Propaganda by omission, routinely carried out by BBC News and the rest of the ‘mainstream’ news media, is a crucial tool enabling Washington and London to pursue their aims; whether that be ‘regime change’, exploitation of oil and other natural resources, and geopolitical domination.

‘Grand Wizards’ And Client Journalism

Occasionally, the strict enforcement of ideological purity imposed on corporate journalists is laid bare when they step out of line by the merest millimeter. Thus, for example, BBC television presenter Naga Munchetty had to issue an apology on Twitter for ‘liking’ tweets that mocked Tory government minister Robert Jenrick for appearing on a BBC Breakfastinterview with a Union Jack prominently displayed behind him.

She tweeted:

‘I “liked” tweets today that were offensive in nature about the use of the British flag as a backdrop in a government interview this morning. I have since removed these “likes”. This do [sic] not represent the views of me or the BBC. I apologise for any offence taken. Naga’

This read like a statement that had been dictated from lofty levels within the BBC hierarchy. When you are a high-profile BBC figure, you are obliged to tweet out an apology for daring to question the trappings of ‘patriotism’. But when have BBC journalists ever apologised for catastrophically platforming government propaganda on Iraq, Libya, Syria, the NHS, ‘austerity’, militarism, the royal family? The list is endless.

On Twitter, tweets from the broadcaster RT are flagged with the warning, ‘Russia state-affiliated media.’ Rather than apologise for broadcasting Western propaganda, it is far more likely that a senior client journalist working for the UK state-affiliated media known as ‘BBC News’ will send out whitewashing tweets to minimise or deflect any challenges to the government. Take BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg, a prime example of this key propaganda function. On the National Day of Reflection on 23 March, the anniversary of the start of the first UK Covid-19 lockdown, Boris Johnson had boasted during a private meeting of Tory MPs:

‘The reason we have the vaccine success is because of capitalism, because of greed, my friends.’

There was a huge outcry on social media. Rachel Clarke, a palliative care doctor who has been outspoken in her criticism of the government during the pandemic, tweeted in response to Johnson’s crassly insensitive and smug comment:

‘But he’s wrong.

‘Human nature is bigger & better & bursting with more grace & decency than he’ll ever know.’

Wise and compassionate words.

By contrast, Kuenssberg went into full damage-limitation mode, tweeting:

‘More on PM’s “greed” comments – one of those present says Johnson was having a crack at Chief Whip, Mark Spencer, who was gobbling a cheese + pickle sandwich while he was talking about the vaccine, “it was hardly Gordon Gekko”, “it was banter” directed at the Chief, it’s said’

It is a fair point: probably not even Gordon Gekko would have joked about the virtue of capitalism and greed on a day when his very clear responsibility for the deaths of 149,000 people was at the forefront of many people’s minds.

Newspaper cartoonist Dave Brown depicted brilliantly what the day of reflection should have meant: Johnson reflected in the mirror as the Grim Reaper carrying a scythe with the number 149,000 engraved on it.

Kam Sandhu, head of advocacy at the independent thinktank Autonomy, reminded her Twitter followers that, in 2019, Kuenssberg had brushed off the revelation that Brexiteer MPs visiting Chequers, the prime minister’s 16th century manor house, had called themselves ‘the Grand Wizards’. The BBC political editor had tweeted:

‘just catching up on timeline, for avoidance of doubt, couple of insiders told me using the nickname informally, no intended connection to anything else’

Presumably the use of an infamous Ku Klux Klan term of white supremacy was to be considered mere ‘banter’. There are countless other examples of Kuenssberg deflecting criticism of Tories, while echoing and amplifying their propaganda. You may recall that she acted to defend the government when it belatedly went into the first lockdown one year ago. She misled the public, as Richard Horton, editor of the prestigious medical journal The Lancet noted last March:

‘Laura Kuenssberg says (BBC) that, “The science has changed.” This is not true. The science has been the same since January. What has changed is that govt advisors have at last understood what really took place in China and what is now taking place in Italy. It was there to see.’

Her insidious role in endlessly propping up the government narrative on any given topic is a ‘courtesy’ conspicuous by its absence when it came to the ‘impartial’ BBC political editor’s reporting of Jeremy Corbyn and, in particular, the manufactured crisis of supposedly institutional antisemitism in the Labour party.

On 26 November 2019, just prior to the general election on 12 December, Kuenssberg tweeted about Tory-supporting chief rabbi Ephraim Mirvis’ suggestion that Corbyn should be ‘considered unfit for office’, 23 times in 24 hours. This at a time when journalistic impartiality was obviously never more essential.

Kuenssberg is not an exception within BBC News, although given her very high-profile position, it is not always as blatant with other BBC journalists. Take BBC diplomatic correspondent James Landale, for instance: another serial offender. An item that he presented on BBC News at Ten on 16 March added to the ever-rising steaming pile of ‘impartial’ journalism scaremongering about Official Enemies that must be countered by the peace-loving West.

In line with a new UK government report on ‘defence’, Landale depicted China and Russia as threats that required this country to ‘show Britain can project force overseas’. As part of the strategy, the new £6.1 billion aircraft carrier, HMS Queen Elizabeth, will hold joint operations with allies in the Indo-Pacific later this year. ‘But will it be enough?’, intoned Landale, ‘impartially’ cheerleading the UK’s ‘projection of force’ across the globe.

Continuing his virtually government spokesperson role, Landale added:

‘And the cap on Britain’s stockpile of nuclear warheads will be lifted because of what the report says is “the evolving security environment”.’

The likely increase in the UK’s nuclear weapons was just slipped out, almost as an after-thought. There was no mention that nuclear weapons are now prohibited under international law after the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons was ratified earlier this year. The Treaty includes:

‘a comprehensive set of prohibitions on participating in any nuclear weapon activities. These include undertakings not to develop, test, produce, acquire, possess, stockpile, use or threaten to use nuclear weapons.’

In July 2017, over 120 countries voted to adopt the Treaty. In October 2020, the 50th country ratified the Treaty which meant it became international law on 22 January, 2021. Where were the BBC News headlines?

As Double Down News observed:

‘Boris Johnson set to expand Nuclear Warheads by 40%

‘No money for Nurses but money for Armageddon’

But all this must have slipped Landale’s mind. Or perhaps there was no time to include information deemed unimportant by him or his editors. There was, however, ample room for a major item on that evening’s BBC News at Ten titled, ‘Duke leaves hospital’. This covered Prince Philip’s return to Buckingham Palace after one month in hospital for heart treatment. And why was this a major ‘news’ headline on the BBC? Because BBC News is staunchly royalist, fervently establishment and an upholder of the unjust UK class system.

All of this just goes to show that BBC News really is the world’s most refined state propaganda service. As BBC founder John Reith confided in his diary during the 1926 General Strike:

‘They [the government] know they can trust us not to be really impartial.’

(‘The Reith Diaries’, edited by Charles Stewart, Collins, 1975; entry for 11 May, 1926)

The same holds true today.

In this era of Permanent War, potential nuclear Armageddon and climate breakdown, the enormous cost to victims of UK and Western state-corporate policy around the world is incalculable.

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Israel has accused Iran of doing many nefarious things. But the historical record shows that whatever Israel accuses Iran of, it is likely that Israel is already doing it.

For example, Israel has repeatedly accused Iran of destabilizing the region by malignantly spreading across the region and forming alliances and exercising influence in Syria, Iraq and Lebanon.

But Israel is spreading across the region by forming alliances and exercising influence across the region. With varying degrees of formality and publicity, Israel has expanded its network and formed alliances with Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco. And this Israeli spread has been destabilizing both in terms of increasing weapons in the region and legitimizing and solidifying occupations.

The agreement between Israel and the UAE meant F-35 fighter jets, Reaper drones and EA-18G Growler jets that are capable of jamming enemy air defenses for the UAE and a large weapons package for Israel in compensation, potentially including combat helicopters, advanced communications satellites, bunker buster bombs, F-35s, KC-46A tanker aircrafts that are capable of refueling many aircrafts simultaneously and V-22 aircrafts that can transform from helicopter to airplane.

The agreements have also led to the solidifying of occupations in the region. And it is not only the solidifying of the Palestinian occupation. In order to extract an agreement from Morocco, the price was US recognition of Morocco’s sovereignty over Western Sahara: an occupation that is illegal under international law. Both the UN and the International Court of Justice have ruled in favor of Western Sahara’s right to self governance.

Israel is also reportedly planning to lobby the US not to pressure Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the UAE over human rights issues because of the value Israel places on these alliances in confronting Iran. Israeli officials reportedly want to remind Washington that the agreements they have signed in the region should be prioritized over concerns about human rights.

Spreading its influence across the region sounds a lot like what Israel is accusing Iran of. And Israel’s spread has been destabilizing in terms of the proliferation of arms, the legitimizing of occupations and the acceptance of human rights abuses.

Using Proxies

Israel has long accused Iran of using proxy forces in Syria, Iraq and Lebanon.

But Israel has a distasteful history of using proxy forces going back at least as early as the proxy use of the Phalange militia in Lebanon. Not wanting to be seen sending Israeli soldiers into the Palestinian refugee camps, Israel used its proxy Christian militia. According to Patrick Tyler, in A World of Trouble, the Phalange militia developed “with covert assistance from Israel.” In September 1982, the Israeli proxy Phalange militia slaughtered hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of Palestinian refugees in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. Israel admits to 700 people massacred; the Palestinians claim 2,750. In Balfour’s Shadow, David Cronin places the number at between 800 and 3,500.

More recently, Israel has employed the Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK) as a proxy in the assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists. Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh reports that a former senior intelligence official told him that the assassinations are “primarily being done by MEK through liaison with the Israelis.” Most recently, Iran has suggested a proxy role for the MEK in the assassination of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh.

Israel accuses Iran of using proxy forces. But Israeli history demonstrates the well documented use of proxy forces to carry out some of its most illegal work.

Terrorism

Israel has forcefully tried to characterize Iran as a leading state sponsor of terrorism.

But Israel has recently aligned itself with the most barbarous terrorists. Israel has allied itself with the Islamic State and al-Nusra. In September 2013, Michael Oren, the Israeli Ambassador to the US said, “We always wanted Bashar Assad to go, we always preferred the bad guys who weren’t backed by Iran to the bad guys who were backed by Iran.” Oren told the Jerusalem Post that “This was the case . . . even if the other ‘bad guys’ were affiliated with al-Qaeda.” Nearly a year later, in June 2014, Oren would repeat Israel’s position of preferring the Islamic State and al-Nusra over Assad: “From Israel’s perspective, if there’s got to be an evil that’s got to prevail, let the Sunni evil prevail.” A year and a half later, Defense Minister Moshe Yalon would essentially reiterate this firm Israeli preference.

And Israel didn’t just root for the Islamic State, it aided it. Israel has repeatedly bombed Syrian targets, and UN observers in the Golan Heights have reported witnessing cooperation between Israel and Syrian rebels. Netanyahu has also revealed that Israel has hit Hezbollah forces fighting against the Islamic State and al-Qaeda in Syria dozens of times. And it has been exposed that Israel also provided funding, food and fuel to Syrian rebels fighting Assad.

In The Management of Savagery, Max Blumenthal says that “ISIS found a defender in Israel.” He reports that the director of “the Likud Party-linked Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies” advocated for pursuing the “weakening of Islamic State, but not its destruction.” They called ISIS a “useful tool.” There are reports of coordination and communication between Israel and al-Nusra, including Israel providing maps.

So, Israel is doing exactly what it accuses Iran of doing.

Nuclear Weapons

Most vociferously, Israel has accused Iran of possessing a nuclear weapons program and of secretly constructing nuclear weapons facilities.

It is well known that Israel has a nuclear weapons program. A leaked email written by Colin Powell suggests that the US estimates Israel’s arsenal at 200 nuclear weapons.

What has received less attention amid the cries that Iran has secretly built nuclear facilities is that Israel is secretly building on to the nuclear facility it secretly built. Satellite images published in February, 2021, show that Israel has been “carrying out a major expansion of its Dimona nuclear facility” for at least the past two years.

So, while Israel accuses Iran of secretly pursuing a nuclear weapons program and secretly constructing nuclear facilities, Israel is secretly pursuing a nuclear weapons program and secretly constructing nuclear facilities.

Attacking Ships

Back in 2019, Iran was blamed for two limpet mine attacks on ships. Israel has also blamed Iran for a recent explosion on the Israeli cargo ship MV Helios Ray. Iran has denied responsibility for the attack.

But it looks like Israel has been very busy blowing up Iranian ships. The Wall Street Journal has shockingly reported that, since late 2019, Israel has attacked at least a dozen ships headed for Syria and carrying Iranian oil. Israel has attacked Iranian vessels or vessels carrying Iranian oil with weapons that included mines. At least some of the Israeli attacks have been carried out with limpet mines: exactly like the attacks Iran is accused of. The Wall Street Journal reports that three of the Israeli strikes took place in 2019 and six more took place in 2020.

As in the case of regional influence, use of proxies, terrorism, and constructing secret nuclear facilities, Israel seems to be guilty of the very thing it is accusing Iran of: blowing up ships. This boomeranging accusation is consistent with a historical pattern of Israel accusing Iran of the very things Israel is doing.

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House Democrats are leading a charge to repeal the 2002 Authorization for Use of Military Force that President Bush used to invade Iraq in 2003, that Obama used for a host of anti-ISIS air campaigns over eight years, and President Trump cited to justify a 2020 drone strike on Iranian General Qassem Soleimani. 

Dismantling the AUMFs that are used to wage wars that are increasingly attenuated from the original intent of those authorizations is important. But if wars like Afghanistan are not also brought to an end, then they will inevitably be made to fit new and more narrow authorizations making it even harder to end them in the future.

Press secretary Jen Psaki recently indicated that President Biden welcomes an effort by Congress to replace the 2001 and 2002 AUMFs with a “narrow and specific framework that will ensure we can protect Americans from terrorist threats while ending the forever wars.” But he is not the first president to cast doubt on the utility of AUMFs that are now nearly two decades old. In a 2013 speech at the National Defense University, President Obama remarked, “[s]o I look forward to engaging Congress and the American people in efforts to refine, and ultimately repeal, the AUMF’s mandate.” But this inclination did not stop the Obama administration from using the 2001 AUMF to justify attacks on ISIS in Syria by arguing that the group was essentially cut from the same cloth as al-Qaeda. Similarly, President Biden’s appeal for oversight did not stop him from ordering an airstrike in Syria and citing his Article II powers as Commander-in-Chief, nor has it led him to end the war in Afghanistan.

That President Biden continues to deploy U.S. military force abroad while also calling for more restrictive AUMFs is not surprising. He may feel political pressure to continue to use the broad powers authorized to him until Congress hopefully relieves him of this burden and takes more responsibility over America’s wars. This is precisely why narrower AUMFs will not end America’s forever wars without additional steps. Truly ending forever wars will require leaders and the “NatSec”community to prioritize the proven costs of engaging in forever war over the future risks of not taking military action.

Afghanistan is a good place to start. If President Biden refuses to leave Afghanistan, then a war with no achievable end state will likely be grandfathered into any future and purportedly more narrow AUMF. This may not occur explicitly in the authorization’s text but through its application. Much needed repeals of the current AUMFs will be reduced to little more than Congressional virtue signaling. If the U.S. cannot walk away from the war in Afghanistan, then it is difficult to imagine how Washington will prioritize other threats without getting dragged into perpetual conflicts of choice.

Others have also argued that merely replacing or passing a new AUMF does not amount to Congressional oversight. In 2018, Richard Fontaine and Vance Serchuk warned, “[l]awmakers who portray passage of an AUMF as the ultimate fulfillment of their war-powers responsibilities therefore risk elevating constitutional form over national security substance.” Rather than pass an AUMF and let it sit untouched for years, they assert that Congressional oversight should be “continuous” and occur “independent from any AUMF mechanism.” Jack Goldsmith and Samuel Moyn arguethat, “Congress must do more than withdraw old permission slips” and instead “cut off funding for discretionary presidential wars after a short period, absent congressional permission or a defined emergency.”

Thus, genuine oversight must function as a threshold rather than a loophole. This will inherently require America’s leaders to accept manageable degrees of risk to avoid neverending wars. Afghanistan represents the clearest test of this approach. Leaving Afghanistan militarily will force the United States to find new ways to respond to potential terrorism threats on U.S. targets in the region. But these threats no longer present the same risk they once did and the capacity to disrupt attacks within the United States is far greater than on the morning of 9/11. The cost of continuing to wage endless wars long ago surpassed any security benefits.

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Featured image: A U.S. Army Soldier from the A Company, 1-503rd Battalion, 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team, conducts a patrol with a platoon of Afghan national army soldiers to check on conditions in the village of Yawez, Wardak province, Afghanistan, Feb. 17, 2010. Partnership between the U.S. Army and the Afghan national army is proving to be a valuable tool in bringing security to the area. (U.S. Army photo by Sgt. Russell GilchrestReleased)

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The head of US Special Operations Command (SOCOM) told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday that the command launched a new task force to focus on information operations to counter China in the Pacific.

According to a report from C4ISRNET, the task force, known as the Joint Task Force Indo-Pacific team, will  focus “on information and influence operations in the Pacific theater.” Gen. Richard D. Clarke, the commander of SOCOM, said the task force will work with “like-minded partners” in the region.

“We actually are able to tamp down some of the disinformation that they [China] continuously sow,” Clarke said. It’s not clear exactly what this new task force will be doing, but the C4ISRNET report suggested that offensive cyber operations could be part of the influence campaign.

Gen. Paul Nakasone, the head of US Cyber Command, also spoke with senators on Thursday and pointed to offensive cyber operations the command took prior to the 2020 election that he claims thwarted election interference.

“The idea of operating outside of the United States, being able to both enable our partners with information and act when authorized. This is an active approach to our adversaries,” Nakasone said. “It’s been most effective as we’ve seen with the 2018 and 2020 elections with adversaries attempting to influence us, attempting to interfere but not being able to do that.”

Gen. Clarke also spoke of information operations conducted under SOCOM’s Special Operations Forces, specifically a group known as Military Information Support Operations professionals that are deployed at embassies around the world.

“By working closely with those partners to ensure that our adversaries, our competitors are not getting that free pass and to recognize what is truth from fiction and continue to highlight that to using our intel communities is critical,” he said.

The Biden administration has made it clear that countering Beijing is its top foreign policy priority. The task force shows that Washington’s campaign against Chinese influence will be played out in many theaters.

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Dave DeCamp is the news editor of Antiwar.com, follow him on Twitter @decampdave.

Featured image is from OneWorld

All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

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Data released today by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on the number of injuries and deaths reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) following COVID vaccines showed that between Dec. 14, 2020 and March 19, 2021, there were 44,606 reports of adverse events, including 2,050 deaths and 7,095 serious injuries.

In the U.S., 118.3 million COVID vaccine doses had been administered as of March 19.

VAERS is the primary mechanism for reporting adverse vaccine reactions in the U.S. Reports submitted to VAERS require further investigation before a causal relationship can be confirmed. Every Friday, the CDC makes public all VAERS vaccine injury reports received as of the previous week.

This week’s VAERS data included 2,306 reports of anaphylaxis. Fifty-five percent of anaphylaxis reports were attributed to the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, 45% to Moderna and 1% to the Johnson & Johnson (J&J) vaccine, which was rolled out in the U.S. on March 2.

As The Defender reported earlier this month, the J&J vaccine contains polysorbate 80, known to trigger allergic reactions. The Moderna and Pfizer vaccines contain polyethylene glycol (PEG), also known to trigger anaphylactic reactions.

The latest news report of an anaphylactic reaction to a COVID vaccine was of a 68-year-old Kansas woman who died a day after receiving the vaccine. According to EMS dispatch records, the woman had an allergic reaction at a vaccine clinic site around 4 p.m. on Tuesday, KMBC reported. She had difficulty breathing and speaking and was injected with an EpiPen.

Kansas Department of Health and Environment spokesperson Kristi Zears told The Wichita Eagle that Evans had an anaphylactic reaction during a waiting period after receiving the shot. She was transported to the hospital and pronounced dead a day later. It is not clear whether Evans had underlying health conditions and the Kansas health agency did not indicate which COVID vaccine was administered.

According to the CDC’s website,

“the CDC follows up on any report of death to request additional information and learn more about what occurred and to determine whether the death was a result of the vaccine or unrelated.”

To date, the only information the CDC has published related to the investigation of COVID vaccine-related deaths and how those investigations were conducted is a COVID-19 Vaccine Safety Update via the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), published on Jan. 27.

On March 8, The Defender contacted the CDC with questions about reported deaths and injuries related to COVID vaccines. We provided a written list of questions about how the CDC conducts investigations into reported deaths, the status of investigations on deaths reported in the media, if autopsies are being done and the standard for determining whether an injury is causally connected to a vaccine.

We also inquired about whether healthcare providers are reporting all injuries and deaths that might be connected to the COVID vaccine, and what education initiatives are in place to encourage and facilitate proper and accurate reporting.

As of today, 18 days later, the CDC has not responded or followed up with our calls or emails. We have contacted them numerous times and are either told “they received the email,” “they will escalate it and it is in the system” or their press officers are still reviewing it. After our most recent follow up call this Wednesday and giving them an updated deadline of 48 hours, we still have not heard back.

A look at the numbers

Overall, the data released today reflects trends that have been emerging since The Defender first began tracking VAERS reports related to COVID vaccines.

This week’s VAERS data show:

• As of March 19, 321 pregnant women had reported adverse events related to COVID vaccines, including 97 reports of miscarriage or premature birth. None of the COVID vaccines approved for Emergency Use Authorization has been confirmed safe or effective for pregnant women, although J&J said earlier this month it would begin testing on pregnant women, infants and the immunocompromised.
• 535 cases of Bell’s Palsy. Of those, 64% of cases were reported after Pfizer-BioNTech vaccinations — almost twice as many as reported (36%) following vaccination with the Moderna vaccine. Three cases of Bell’s Palsy were reported with J&J’s vaccine (about 1%).

Physicians sound alarm about need for pre-screening

Meanwhile, concerns about mass vaccination continued to make national and international headlines this week.

As The Defender reported Tuesday, Dr. Hooman Noorchashm, cardiothoracic surgeon and patient safety advocate, said we’re taking the COVID pandemic problem — where a half-percent of the population is susceptible to dying — and compounding it by vaccinating people who are already infected. In an interview with Fox News host and political commentator, Tucker Carlson, Noorchasm said public health officials are making a “dramatic error” by promoting a “one-size-fits-all” COVID vaccination program:

“… the signal is deafening, the people who are having complications or adverse events are the people who have recently or are currently or previously infected [with COVID]. I don’t think we can ignore this.”

Noorchashm believes that a #ScreenB4Vaccine campaign could save millions from vaccine injuries. He is promoting a screening campaign that consists of “PCR or Rapid Antigen test to determine if there is an active infection and an IgG antibody test that would allow determination of a past infection. If either of these tests are positive, vaccination ought to be delayed for a minimum of 3 – 6 months,” Noorchasm told The Defender. “If at that time IgG levels are waning, it is reasonable to consider getting a vaccine shot. But even then, blood IgG levels should guide whether or not a person gets vaccinated.”

Noorchasm sent a third communication to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration this week, warning that deaths like that of 32-year-old Benjamin G. Goodman, who died after receiving the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, could have been prevented, and that there will be more deaths unless people are screened before being vaccinated.

An article in The Hill this week, by several physicians, also suggested that people be prescreened for COVID before being vaccinated.

The physicians wrote:

“A closer look at the level of protection obtained by a single shot vaccine regimen for those who are ‘COVID-primed’ is needed. Rigorous, effective and efficient antibody prescreening tools to identify these individuals would be required as well.”

AstraZeneca under fire in U.S. and Europe

As far as individual vaccines, AstraZeneca garnered the most headlines this week, in Europe and the U.S.

On March 22, The Defender reported that two independent research teams in Norway and Germany identified antibodies that provoke immune reactions leading to the type of blood clots experienced by some people who received AstraZeneca’s COVID vaccine.

Although many countries resumed their vaccination program with AstraZeneca’s vaccine after the EMA’s preliminary findings, some countries, including France, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland, did not lift their restrictions on its use.

According to Reuters, Finland announced Wednesday it was still looking into two cases of blood clots but would resume using the AstraZeneca vaccine against COVID for people aged 65 and over. Finland plans to complete its investigation by April 6 at the earliest.

On March 23, U.S. health officials accused AstraZeneca of misrepresenting efficacy data when it included “outdated information” in its clinical trial results, which may have led to the vaccine maker providing the public with an incomplete view of its efficacy data, The Defender reported.

The statement by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases came less than a day after the pharmaceutical company said its vaccine was 79% effective against COVID and 100% effective against severe or critical disease and hospitalization.

AstraZeneca released updated information on its COVID-19 clinical trial Wednesday which showed an efficacy rate of 76% against symptomatic COVID infection instead of the 79% figure released Monday. The estimated efficacy in people over 65 rose slightly, from 80% to 85%. The vaccine maker identified no safety concerns related to the vaccine.

On March 24, the Ukrainian government urged the public not to jump to conclusions after a servicewoman died two days after getting the AstraZeneca COVID vaccine, reported Fox News. Although the woman reportedly had chronic cardiovascular disease and other comorbidities, she experienced no side effects from the vaccine before she suddenly lost consciousness.

According to Reuters, nine other people were given the vaccine from the same batch on the same day and had no ill effects.

Children’s Health Defense asks anyone who has experienced an adverse reaction, to any vaccine, to file a report following these three steps.

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Megan Redshaw is a freelance reporter for The Defender. She has a background in political science, a law degree and extensive training in natural health.

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Norwegian health authorities still haven’t reached a conclusion on the AstraZeneca vaccine. The pause in vaccinations will be kept in place for three more weeks. A decision will be made before April 15.

“We need to know if there have been more cases of side effects in other countries, than those we already know about. We will be working very closely with other Nordic countries, especially Denmark,” said Camilla Stoltenberg, the head of the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, to NRK.

They will also investigate if there are less serious cases of side effects that have gone unreported in other countries.

Four dead in Norway

Norway halted vaccinations with the AstraZeneca vaccine on March 11, after reports of possible serious side effects surfaced in several countries.

Four people have died from a rare combination of blood clots, low platelets and bleeding in Norway after receiving the AstraZeneca-vaccine.

A group of Norwegian doctors and researchers concluded that at least two of the deaths were caused by a powerful immune response to the vaccine on March 18.

“There is nothing in the patient history of these individuals that could give such a powerful immune response. I am confident that the antibodies we have found are the cause, and I see no other explanation than that the vaccine has triggered it,” said professor and chief physician at Oslo University Hospital, Pål Andre Holme.

Norway and Denmark still haven’t concluded

Around 120.000 people have received a dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine in Norway, with the first dose being administered on February 7. So far there have been six reported cases of a rare condition of blood clots in patients who have received the vaccine. Four of them are dead.

Several other countries, like Germany, Italy, France and Spain, also paused the use of the AstraZeneca vaccine after the early reports of side effects.

After the European Medicines Agency (EMA) concluded that the vaccine is safe and effective, almost all of these countries have resumed vaccinations using AstraZeneca.

The EMA did not consider the blood clot-report from the Norwegian team of experts, as it arrived a day after the agency finished their investigations.

Currently, Norway and Denmark are the only countries that are still not putting their doses of AstraZeneca to use.

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The Cape Verde Supreme Court has approved a request to extradite Venezuelan government envoy Alex Saab to the US.

“The Supreme Court confirms the legal authorization for Saab’s extradition to the United States,” the ruling issued on Wednesday read.

The Colombian-born businessman was detained on an Interpol warrant in June 2020 during a stopover in the African archipelago. He was reportedly on his way to Iran to negotiate trade agreements on behalf of the Nicolás Maduro government.

Caracas protested his arrest, arguing that Saab was protected by diplomatic immunity as “an agent of a sovereign government,” and launched a campaign for his release. The subsequent months saw Washington’s request approved by lower courts, in spite of the absence of a mutual extradition treaty between the two countries, and appealed to higher instances by Saab’s lawyers.

His defense team, which includes high-profile Spanish jurist Baltasar Garzón, secured his transfer to house arrest in January and vowed to appeal the latest ruling before the Cape Verde Constitutional Court.

“We reaffirm our confidence that Saab will be released,” stated lawyer Femi Falana, adding that the defense was “studying the decision.” The businessman’s attorneys and the Venezuelan Foreign Ministry have blasted the arrest and extradition approvals as “politically motivated.”

The Cape Verde Supreme Court decision came on the heels of an Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) Court of Justice ruling that Saab’s arrest had been “illegal” and calling for his immediate release.

“We found his arrest was arbitrary and subsequent detention throughout the period until today was illegal,” Justice Edward Amoako Asante of the Abuja-based tribunal stated on Monday.

The ECOWAS court found that Cape Verdean authorities arrested Saab before the Interpol arrest warrant was issued.

However, the archipelago’s judicial body argued that the ECOWAS Court of Justice had no jurisdiction on the matter, despite Cape Verde belonging to the West African economic union.

For their part, Saab’s attorneys blasted this decision as “an extraordinary act of disobedience,” arguing that the ECOWAS tribunal’s ruling is binding and calling for other community member countries to secure its enforcement.

Washington has accused the Colombo-Venezuelan businessman of running a “vast corruption network” and profiting from overpriced import contracts for Venezuela’s CLAP program, which delivers subsidized food bags to a reported seven million families.

In July 2019, the US Treasury Department sanctioned Saab, business associate Alvaro Pulido and thirteen foreign-based firms allegedly owned or controlled by them and used to circumvent US sanctions. Shortly after, Saab and Pulido were indicted by a Florida court on charges of laundering US $350 million, but no evidence was publicly disclosed.

The CLAP program has been targeted by US authorities as part of a wide-reaching sanctions program aimed at ousting the Maduro government. Measures have included an oil embargo, secondary sanctions, a clampdown on swap deals and the seizure of a number of Venezuelan state assets held abroad.

The unilateral coercive measures have been denounced by multilateral bodies for their “devastating” effects and classified as “collective punishment” of the Venezuelan population, while Caracas has filed a lawsuit at the International Criminal Court (ICC) arguing that they constitute a crime against humanity.

The Trump administration identified Saab as an important player for the Maduro administration to secure key imports, with Washington’s blockade forcing Caracas to increasingly rely on middlemen. Saab’s companies have reportedly secured a number of government contracts over the years in the housing, mining and food sectors.

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And so we come to March 23rd, and lockdown’s first birthday. Or, as we call it here, the longest two weeks in history.

1 year. 12 calendar months. 365 increasingly gruelling days.

It’s a long time since “2 weeks to flatten the curve”, became an obvious lie. Sometime in July it turned into a sick joke. The curve was flattened, the NHS protected and the clapping was hearty and meaningful.

…and none of it made any difference.

This was not a sacrifice for the “greater good”. It was not a hard decision with arguments on both sides. It was not a risk-benefit scenario. The “risks” were in fact certainties, and the “benefits” entirely fictional.

Because Lockdowns don’t work. It’s really important to remember that.

Even if you subscribe to the belief that “Sars-Cov-2” is a unique discrete entity (which is far from proven), or that it is incredibly dangerous (which is demonstrably untrue), the lockdown has not worked to, in any way, limit this supposed threat.

Lockdowns. Don’t. Work.

They don’t make any difference, the curves don’t flatten and the R0 number doesn’t drop and the lives aren’t saved (quite the opposite, as we’ve all seen).

Just look at the graphs.

This one, comparing “Covid deaths” in the UK (lockdown) and Sweden (no lockdown):

Or this one, comparing “Covid deaths” in California (lockdown) and Florida (no lockdown):

From Belarus to Sweden to Florida to Nicaragua to Tanzania, the evidence is clear. “Covid”, whatever that means in real terms, is not impacted by lockdowns.

Putting the entire population under house arrest doesn’t benefit public health. In fact, it’s (rather predictably) incredibly counter-productive.

The damage done by shuttering businesses, limiting access to healthcare, postponing treatments and diagnoses, postponed surgeries, increasing depression, soaring unemployment and mass poverty has been discussed to death. The scale of the impact cannot be overstated.

Dr David Nabarro, World Health Organization special envoy for Covid-19, said this of lockdowns back in October:

We in the World Health Organization do not advocate lockdowns as the primary means of control of the virus[…]just look at what’s happened to the tourism industry…look what’s happening to small-holding farmers[…]it seems we may have a doubling of world poverty by next year. We may well have at least a doubling of child malnutrition […] This is a terrible, ghastly global catastrophe.”

A terrible, global catastrophe. A doubling of childhood malnutrition.

The “pandemic” didn’t do that, lockdowns did that. They were never going to achieve their stated aims. And what’s more, they were never intended to achieve those aims.

Too often soft language in the media talks about “misjudgments” or “mistakes” or “incompetence”. Supposed critics claim the government “panicked” or “over-reacted”. That is nonsense. The easiest, cheesiest excuse that has ever existed.

“Whoops”, they say, with an emphatic shrug and shit-eating grin “I guess we done messed up!”. Unflattering, but better than the truth.

Because the truth is that the government isn’t mistaken or scared or stupid…they are malign. And dishonest. And cruel.

All the suffering of lockdown was entirely predictable and deliberately imposed. For reasons that have nothing to do with helping people and everything to do controlling them.

It’s been more than apparent for most of the last fifty-two weeks that the agenda of lockdown was not public health, but laying the groundwork for the “new normal” and “the great reset”.

A series of programmes designed to completely undercut civil liberties all across the world, reversing decades (if not centuries) of social progress. A re-feudalisation of society, with the 99% cheerfully taking up their peasant smocks “to protect the vulnerable”, whilst the elite proselytise about the worth of rules they happily admit do not apply to them.

And we’ve all had lives ruined and a year of precious time wasted. For nothing. You’ve been locked up for two weeks that lasted 365 days. For nothing.

…or rather, for everything. Because that’s what they are trying to take from us. Everything. And the only way to stop them is not to let them. To simply refuse consent.

Let’s not let lockdown get a second birthday.

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17 years of a US-UN military occupation paved the way for 10 years of a US imposed dictatorship in our country, Haiti.

This regime has turned the police force into government death squads.

State corruption and land grabs are rampant..

Youth in popular neighborhoods are armed to the teeth by the government and the oligarchs to fight and kill one another, to create chaos in the streets, and to keep the people in these neighborhoods from joining anti-government protests.

For the first time in the history of our country wanton murders, kidnappings and rapes are a daily occurrence.

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In a recent episode of the High Wire, host Del Bigtree says:

We are putting immense pressure on [the coronavirus] with an underperforming vaccine that is going to turn it into a hulk. And [Dr. Bossche’s] concern is that it will become so viral and so deadly that there is nothing we can do to stop it.

I can’t help but feel Bigtree and Bossche may be big fans of I Am Legend. Both the novel and the movie are set in a post-apocalyptic America, where a mutant measles virus has wiped out most of mankind. Outside of such dystopian thrillers, however, it’s hard to find examples of such genocidal pandemics (natural or manmade).

Del Bigtree was, as many know, commenting on Dr. Geert Vanden Bossche’s open letter and interview where the vaccine scientist denounces the COVID-19 vaccine.

Well, he sort of denounces it.

Actually, not really.

Instead, he praises the COVID-19 vaccine — merely claiming that it is the “wrong weapon” at the “wrong time.” Ignoring any of its innate dangers and risks, he says that its belated use in the midst of this (invisible) pandemic will trigger more lethal variants.

Super deadly variants: Where have we heard that line before?

His solution to stop these mutant ninja viruses (resulting from an experimental mRNA vaccine)? More vaccines! Yes, he advises mass vaccinating with an even more experimental vaccine.

The idea is this new type of vaccine will stimulate our innate immune system to produce more natural killer (NK) white blood cells.

The natural killer vaccine. Boy, that should sell well.

How many red flags can we plant around this doctor (whose resumé includes helping out the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, GAVI and GSK)?

First off, let me be clear, I think the vaccine is innately dangerous. In animal studies, after being re-exposed to the virus, vaccine trials left a pet cemetery of dead ferrets (according to the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy).

But the idea that an “under-performing” vaccine is going to make the virus even more deadly makes no sense to me. If anything, would not an under-performing vaccine make the virus even weaker?

Also, the proposition that inoculating people (while the virus is already in circulation) would finally lead to this monstrous killer coronavirus (that the WHO has been praying for) makes even less sense. As science writer Rosemary Frei’s explains in her excellent article, The Curious Case of Geert Vanden Bossche:

[Viral resistance] it’s not the major threat Vanden Bossche attempts to scare us about by saying the virus is likely to mutate so much and so quickly because of the current mass vaccination campaigns that soon it could escape all current attempts to stop its spread. Remember, for example, that yearly flu mass vaccination hasn’t caused influenza to spiral out of control and decimate the global population.

In truth, science still has not even proven that viruses are contagious, no less that they can become super-contagious. As Thomas Cowan writes in his book, The Contagion Myth:

It was Louis Pasteur who convinced a skeptical medical community that contagious germs caused disease. However, he eventually admitted that the whole effort to prove contagion was a failure, leading to his famous deathbed confession that “the germ is nothing, the terrain is everything.”

Viruses may be at the scene of the “crime.” But so are police and paramedics. That doesn’t necessarily mean they are to blame. Indeed, a virus may be part of some type of healing or detoxification process. Maybe they even help devour cancer cells? ScienceDaily says that in addition to rejecting virally infected cells, NK cells also reject tumours. Could there be a connection?

As epidemiologist Dr. Ron Brown said in a recent interview:

What is a virus, where does it come from, what is its purpose, and what happens to it in the body? How pathogenic is it, and how infectious is it? Virology does not have the full answers to these basic questions, and yet, public health policy is predicated on assumptions about the nature of viruses that may prove to be the complete opposite of reality.

Therefore, out of everything Dr. Boosche said about the virus (his “enemy”) and vaccines (his “weapon”), these words made the most sense to me:

We don’t understand our weapon… We don’t understand exactly what a virus is, do we? So we go to a war and we don’t know our enemy. We don’t understand the strategy of our enemy. And we don’t know how our weapon works. I mean, how is that going to go? That’s a fundamental problem to begin with.

Bossche’s interview and letter are full of so many contradictions, it’s hard to know where he is coming from. Is he struggling to see through decades of cognitive bias, slowly realizing that pharmaceutical vaccines are not the answer to disease? Is he trying to tell the truth without ending up in the trunk of some car at the bottom of a lake? Is he just confused?

Or is he trying cover up the fact that the COVID-19 vaccine is going to kill people in and of itself? As a means to deflect liability, he may have been hired to deflect blame from the vaccine and, instead, on super-variants that adapted to the belated vaccine.

Seems like a great backup plan for Big-Pharma: Oh, sorry, that vaccine didn’t work. Whoops! Oh, and look, more people are dying! Double whoops! But don’t worry, we have this new vaccine instead to solve the problem we created with the first vaccine.

This reminds me of when a country unjustly attacks another country. The politicians argue not over whether they should attack or not, but whether they should be using air force or ground troops.

I know it sounds crazy, but that’s basically what he seems to be saying. All the while he says almost nothing about the fact we could just strengthen (or stop abusing) our immune systems. To me, it looks like we have far more to fear from lockdowns, vaccines, masking and (anti-)social distancing. In short, it’s the weapons being used against “the enemy” that may be the real threat to our own safety.

I suspect that this idea of “the vaccine mutating the virus” is just a way to get the rest of us to believe in a pandemic of killer variants. Given how long humans have been on the earth, I think common sense tells us that nature is not very likely to concoct some killer virus to wipe us out. The “Wuhan laboratory theory” (whether true or not) provided the conspiratorial community a stronger reason to believe — at the beginning of the scamdemic, at least — that a genetically-modified SARS-CoV-2 may actually have been a threat to humanity.

Well, they’re doing it again, by suggesting that vaccine-induced mutations may actually produce a real pandemic. After all, even the mainstream crowd isn’t (on the whole) too worried about these theoretical variants. As Jordan Schachtel (the brilliant and witty writer behind the The Dossierblog) recently wrote, in his article “The Chicken Little act isn’t working – COVID Mania is wearing off”:

The “public health experts” are scrambling to remain in the spotlight, and even their most reliable scare tactics are failing to keep the masses compliant, paranoid, and afraid. For the “public health” cartel, 2020 was the best year of their lives, and it seems that after one year of “two weeks to slow the spread,” they just can’t muster up the momentum needed to replicate that power high….

For the last few months, the ruling class has settled on promoting “new variants” of the coronavirus in order to keep the power grab going…

But now, the new mutation panic is simply not imprinting in the collective mindset in the same way that the old tactics were deployed. The ruling class feels their control slipping away. For the first time in a full year, they’re losing the argument. The momentum for their causes are collapsing. “New variants” just don’t hit hard enough for people to care.

If man-made mutant pathogens were truly so deadly, you’d think by now that, after all the sanitization of 2020, the entire human race would have died out from Incredible Hulk MRSA mutations. Instead, such microbial doomsday predictions have yet to even cause a significant rise in all-cause mortality.

In conclusion, this paragraph from Rosemary Frei’s article, sums up my feelings on the matter:

COVID has an extremely high survival rate. So why develop yet another expensive, invasive and experimental solution to a problem that barely exists, if it does at all?

We have far more serious problems to contend with: Mass vaccination. Lockdowns. Social distancing. Forced masking. And a generation of children being raised in shame of their own respiratory system.

Natural or otherwise, I suggest we forget about the variant fear-mongering, and focus on the real monsters in our midst.

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John C. A. Manley has spent over a decade ghostwriting for medical doctors, naturopaths and chiropractors. Since March 2020, he has been writing articles that question and expose the contradictions in the COVID-19 narrative and control measures. He is also completing a novel, Much Ado About Corona: A Dystopian Love Story. You can visit his website at MuchAdoAboutCorona.ca.

He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Image license to the Incredible Hulk purchased by the author through Shutterstock, coronavirus image in the public domain from Wikicommons

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Rola Al-Khatib, a journalist for Al-Hadath, and Al-Arabiya, media outlets from Saudi Arabia, were attacked by children at the Al-Hol camp in north-eastern Syria which houses ISIS families.  

The children had been indoctrinated by their mothers to regard any female not wearing a black headscarf and full-length cloak as an ‘infidel’.  The children threatened to kill the journalist.  She explained to them she wanted to help them by interviewing them, but the children reacted violently.

The video shown by Al-Hadath on Saturday showed the children hurling insults at the reporter, calling her an infidel and showering her and her camera crew with stones.

Al-Khatib was reporting on conditions in the dangerous camp housing 62,000 people, who are the families of ISIS, mainly women, and children.

“I’m not carrying a gun or anything, I just want to talk to you, why do you say I’m infidel?” Al-Khatib asked.

“You should wear a hijab before we talk to you,” one of them said.

“What you are wearing is not hijab, not this color, it’s not black.”

She asked the children how would they react to the situation later, as adults, and they replied immediately:

“We will kill you, we have prepared killings for infidels.”

The female ISIS ideology enforcers

The camps suffer from a female band of ISIS loyalists who are extremely radicalized and exert enormous pressure on the women and girls who do not conform to their dictates. There have been many murders in the camp which have been blamed on these fanatics.  They slip into a tent at night and slit the throat of any woman or girl who fails to comply with their demands and dogma.

Shamina Begum claims she “had no choice but to say certain things” to journalists “because I lived in fear of these women coming to my tent one day and killing me and killing my baby.”

Al-Hol camp

Al-Hol camp is a hell-hole housing 62,000 people living in dire conditions with children from 60 different countries.  The camp houses mainly foreign families of ISIS and the children are being raised indoctrinated with extremist ideology.

Radical Islam is neither a religion nor a sect; it is a political ideology. ISIS is only one of many groups following Radical Islam; others include Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood.

Dozens of murders have occurred at the camp and are thought to have been carried out by female extremists who target other females of all ages for failing to follow the strict orders and ideology.

These women and children were among the last remaining ISIS families to be captured after years of living rough in the Syrian desert.  Their fight is over, but their rejection of peace continues. They are waging a psychological war against the world and in defiance of all laws.  They do not represent Islam, or Muslims, but only represent themselves and their death cult.

The camp is administered by the Kurdish separatist militia SDF, who were partners with the US military in the past fight to defeat ISIS.

Roj camp 

Camp manager Nora Abdo of the SDF said Roj camp houses 2,618 persons and is more secure and better provisioned than Al-Hol camp.  Abdo said her biggest concern was the children growing up in the camp abandoned by their governments.

“When they grow up they will hate their homeland, and this will have consequences,” she said. “This should not be their life. What about their future?”

Spanish director Alba Sotorra went to Roj camp in March 2019 and shot a film, “The Return: Life After ISIS,” a documentary shown at the online Texas-based South By Southwest festival. The film features the British ISIS bride Shamina Begum as well as other women from Canada, the US, France, and Germany.

Begum said in the film, “I would say to the people in the UK, give me a second chance because I was still young when I left.”

Begum was a teenager in 2015 when she left Britain with two other girls to travel to Syria to become an ISIS bride.  She married an ISIS fighter from the Netherlands, and is now a widow, and has lost all three children she bore.

Britain’s Supreme Court rejected Begum’s bid to return to challenge a decision stripping her citizenship on national security grounds. Five Supreme Court justices unanimously turned down her request to be able to return to the UK to fight for her citizenship to be restored. Their judgment came six years after the then 15-year-old left east London with friends to join ISIS.

UK Home Secretary Priti Patel welcomed the news, saying it “reaffirmed the home secretary’s authority to make vital national security decisions”.

Begum was discovered by British journalists in 2019 in a camp, but her defiant lack of remorse drew outrage from the British public and leaders alike.

The Kurds as prison guards

Both camps, Roj and Al-Hol, are administered by the US-backed Kurdish separatist militia SDF.

President Trump gave President Erdogan of Turkey the green-light to invade Syria to fight the SDF, which Turkey regards as terrorists, aligned with the PKK.  In October 2019, an estimated 750 ISIS fighters and their women and children escaped from Ain Issa camp where they had been housed.  During the chaos of the invasion, the Kurds were unable to properly secure the inmates of the camp.  Those ISIS men and their families may have made their way through Turkey, who is in support of ISIS, and possibly have found their way on the smuggling boats from Turkey to Europe.

The US-Kurdish alliance

The US illegally invaded Syria during their fight to defeat ISIS.  The Syrian Arab Army and their Russian allies were already fighting ISIS in Syria, but the US refused to coordinate with the two large and powerful military groups already on the ground.  Instead, the US partnered with a small militia, SDF, which are Syrian Kurdish separatists, which Turkey views as terrorists.  It was the Russians who bombed the caravans of stolen oil which kept ISIS financed by selling to President Erdogan.

Western IS brides await going home

Begum and fellow Westerners including the American Hoda Muthana portray an apologetic tone in Sotorra’s film.

 “It was known that Syria was a warzone and I still traveled into it with my children — now how I did this I really don’t know looking back,” says one Western woman.

“I will never be able to understand how a woman from the West can take this decision of leaving everything behind to join a group that is committing the atrocities that Daesh is committing,” Sotorra told AFP.

On March 14 Begum was photographed in Roj camp wearing western clothes.  Gone were the headscarf and cloak, as she wore a t-shirt and sunglasses.  It was obvious she is trying to change her image from an ISIS loyalist to a typical British young woman who seeks to return home. She shook hands with The Telegraph journalist but refused to be interviewed due to legal advice.

Radical Islamic ideology

While ISIS may have been defeated on the battlefields of Iraq and Syria, their ideology remains and continues to attract followers, as well as retaining the ISIS loyalists in the camps who are mainly sisters, wives, widows, and mothers.

Experts have warned that the Al-Hol camp and others have become an incubator for extremism.  The female ISIS ideological warrior is teaching their children to grow up to take revenge on everyone who is not exactly like them.  ISIS has been termed a death-cult and a fascist ideology.  There is still no comprehensive plan on how to deal with the women and children in the various camps in Syria.  Similarly, the US-run Guantanamo Bay facility has inmates who have been all but forgotten.

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Steven Sahiounie is an award-winning journalist. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

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Prevailing financial sector “wisdom” holds that while the bond and stock markets of the US and EU are dangerously inflated following huge COVID borrowings and unprecedented central bank measures, that China is the one example of a market suitable for investment as it has managed to get beyond COVID and restart its economy.

A closer look at recent official measures by Chinese financial regulators and the Bank of China suggest it is anything but safe, and that its domestic real estate sector could be a bubble whose collapse can trigger a global financial catastrophe beyond any seen in modern history.

In 1931 the world financial architecture of Versailles was bankrupt, but not yet in financial collapse. The key trigger to pull the world into the Great Depression was not the 1929 Wall Street stock crash, but rather the collapse of a relatively small Austrian bank.

In ways remarkably analogous to the unfolding global financial crisis of today, world credit had been built after 1919 on a pyramid of increasingly dubious debts, with the House of Morgan and Wall Street financial firms sitting at the peak of the pyramid.

Most of Europe and a large number of developing countries from Bolivia to Poland were linked into the Wall Street credit pyramid. In 1929-1931, the domino-style failure of those Morgan-initiated credit links to Europe and beyond turned a manageable American stock market crash into the worst deflation crisis in American history, precipitating a global depression.

The amount of foreign bonds issued by Wall Street in the decade until the 1929 market crash was about $7,000,000,000, a huge amount equal to nearly 10% of total US Gross Domestic Product. The war-damaged European economies used more than 90% of these American loans to buy American goods, a boon to major US corporations listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

When the buying collapsed after 1929, however, Wall Street’s foreign lending boom became a vehicle that severely worsened the US industrial depression. The whole edifice of dollar credits that supported Europe’s debt pyramid during the 1920’s rested on the loans of New York banks, above all from J.P. Morgan & Co., to Europe to refinance short-term credits. The US Government had insisted at Versailles in 1919 that Britain, France and Italy repay its US war loans in dollars.

Much of the credit from New York banks had flowed into Germany after the 1924 Dawes Plan currency stabilization. Within six years, various German municipalities, private companies, port authorities and other entities, had issued bonds underwritten by New York banks and sold to American investors. Germany borrowed nearly $4 billion from abroad during this period.

In the period from 1924 to 1931, almost $6 billion in American credit poured into Europe, equivalent in 2021 to some $92 billion. If US war loans by the Treasury, and the costs of the War itself were added, a total of $40 billion in US funds had gone into Europe in less than 15 years, fully one-fifth of total American GDP in 1914.

America’s conspicuous consumption during the ‘Roaring Twenties’ was based on an illusion of rising household wealth for the majority of its citizens. This debt-driven consumption created the nation’s illusory wealth — the Achilles Heel of the economy. In America, by 1929 fully 60% of all cars and 80% of home radios were bought on installment credit. Behind the façade of American prosperity of the 1920s was an edifice built on debt and illusions of permanent prosperity and rising stock prices, in many ways similar to China since 2000. Once the consumer credit carousel stopped in 1929-1931, the consumption boom collapsed, as the majority of Americans simply could not afford to buy on credit any longer.

In March 1931, Austria, a tiny shard of the prewar Austro-Hungarian Empire with 6 million people, announced it had entered talks with Germany to create a common customs union to boost trade, as depression threatened. Such a union would not even be a technical violation of the Versailles Treaty. It was certainly no threat to world security.

The Government of France reacted swiftly and demanded immediate repayment of some $300 million in short-term credits owed by Germany and Austria to French banks, to pressure both countries to halt their customs union. The demands triggered a panic flight from the shaky Austrian currency. The weakest link in the Austrian financial system was the Vienna Credit Anstalt Bank. It was also the largest bank in Austria. The collapse of the Credit Anstalt led to a depositor panic run on the Darmstaedter-und Nationalbank or Danat-Bank in Germany, and created a currency crisis for the Brüning government, as well. At that point, the Bank of England, the US Federal Reserve, the German Reichsbank, and the Bank of France met to discuss an emergency credit infusion to try to stop the spread of currency panic. It was too late.

China As the new Credit Anstalt?

The analogy today with the unsound Austro-German credit bubble of the 1920s lies ironically, not with the United States, but rather with the Peoples’ Republic of China, and the staggering growth of personal household debt there since the 2008 global financial crisis. The Beijing central authorities in a panic reaction, released an unprecedented volume of $504 billion in credit to local authorities with a mandate to invest to spur the economy. Nowhere was the investment more than in housing, where a new middle-income population was willing to borrow to get their own home.

By 2016-17 Beijing authorities realized that a dangerous speculative bubble in rising house prices threatened the economy. Restrictive measures only drove local authorities and banks into covert “off-balance sheet” lending via so-called local government financing vehicles (LGFV), where the local governments create an investment company that sells bonds to finance real estate or other local projects. With real estate prices inflating at double digits annually to the present, the size of real estate debts has grown to the point today the Peoples’ Bank of China and other regulators openly warn of a bubble as many families rush to borrow for a second home for speculative gain.

Total household debt including mortgage and consumer loans for cars and household appliances in 2020 was a whopping 62% of GDP. The Institute of International Finance (IIF) estimated that China’s total domestic debt rose to 335 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2020. Some have drawn comparisons to the insane real estate inflation in Japan in 1990-91 before the collapse.

In 1998 the Beijing Government allowed citizens to own their own home. The emerging middle class eagerly bought new apartments that were rising everywhere in the major cities. Real estate was viewed as the only safe investment as stocks and bonds were volatile, and capital export was controlled. For the past two decades home price valuations have risen significantly, leading many Chinese to believe it could never stop. This February, despite official measures, China home prices rose year-year by 16.8 %. According to data from China’s National Bureau of Statistics the total market value of China’s real estate is currently around 65 trillion US Dollars– that’s trillion. In 2019, China’s GDP was $14 trillion US, making China real estate far more inflated than USA or EU values by a big margin. A 2018 study found Chinese home prices averaged 9.3 times annual incomes, outstripping inflated San Francisco’s 8.4 times.

Beijing is clearly alarmed and since January has issued strict measures to force local governments away from continuing to feed the real estate bubble. In 2020 to counter the corona lockdowns and economic recession, Beijing issued major stimulus measures. Now with the economy slowly restarting, Beijing is determined to deleverage the bubbles in stocks as well as real estate in hopes of creating what Xi Jinping calls “dual circulation” which in effect, means while trying to maintain growth of exports, that China increasingly gets its 1.4 billion citizens to consume more domestically to lessen dependence on risky exports. This will be no easy job, even for the formidable Chinese.

What Beijing authorities are attempting to do is to cap the real estate bubble, to block speculative borrowing for second homes, in hopes the funds will go to other consumption.

China Debt Pyramid

Xi Jinping and the central government face a high risk dilemma. With the world economy descending by the day deeper into decline, Xi recently issued orders for local governments to insure spending on infrastructure to maintain “dual circulation” economic growth. Yet at the same time, to deflate what it sees as a potentially systemic real estate bubble, Beijing demands local authorities stop new lending off-balance sheet to finance home buying via LGFVs. Something has to give, and it could be default of millions of Chinese on their mortgage loans as unemployment, largely hidden in government data, reportedly grows significantly.

Last September, China’s Evergrande Group, as of 2018 the world’s most valuable real estate company with some $121 billion in real estate and related debt, underwent a cash crisis owing to its excessive debt burden and the slowing economy. In a desperate effort to develop new revenue sources, the real estate group has diversified into solar panels, pig farming, agribusiness, and baby formula. Not a reassuring sign.

The Evergrande crisis is for the time being under control, as it sells billions of assets to reduce debt. However the scare led Beijing authorities to double down on local hidden real estate debts.

According to the state’s National Institution for Finance and Development estimate, total local hidden debt reached an impressive 14.8 trillion yuan or $ 2.3 trillion in 2020. That’s likely very conservative. Standard & Poors estimates the total at between 30 trillion yuan (US$4.2 trillion) to 40 trillion yuan (US $6.1 trillion). Even that may be conservative, as it is deliberately hidden. Since January strict new rules from the central authorities seek to kill or cap such hidden real estate loans in a drive to shift investment into local infrastructure and industry—dual circulation.

On March 16 Liu Guiping, a deputy governor of the People’s Bank of China wrote about financial risk, “We need to… actively and effectively curb the spread of financial risk contagion, and resolutely maintain the bottom line of avoiding systemic financial risks.” That however is easier said than done.

China’s domestic debt has been growing at an average annual rate of around 20 per cent since 2008, far faster than its gross domestic product, a recipe for serious trouble. Official data showed that outstanding household debt, including mostly real estate debt, at the end of 2020 stood at 63.19 trillion yuan (US$9.7 trillion). That’s equivalent of 62 per cent of Chinese gross domestic product.

In 2021 a record 7.1 trillion yuan ($1.1 trillion) of such special local bonds come due and must be rolled over to avoid collapse of local governments. That will mean that the big state banks must somehow finance the local debt, much of it of dubious or “junk bond” value. This, just as Beijing demands the banks finance new infrastructure and growth initiatives outside real estate while also reducing own debt. Despite official loans from Beijing to local authorities to finance small and mid-size business, South China Morning Post reports that in some cases the financing was being obtained by dummy shell corporations and then used illegally for real estate investments.

If troubles in this local bond market spill over into the national sovereign bond market, a huge market worth a staggering $18 trillion, that would drive bond rates far higher, triggering a wave of local defaults in less viable projects including real estate. It is certain that the PBOC, the state central bank, would then pump liquidity to save its giant state banks. But given the scale of the debt, that could well force liquidation of China dollar assets abroad, including its estimated $1.04 trillion of US Treasury debt, as well as Euro bonds.

Ironically, major Wall Street firms such as Ray Dalio’s Bridgewater or BlackRock, and major Wall Street banks, have been investing in the promise of a China economic recovery. With the US bond markets on a razor’s edge in recent weeks with a new $1.9 trillion Biden stimulus and national debt soaring skywards, it would take little from a China bond crisis to trigger a repeat of the 1931 Austria crisis. Only this time, the entire world economy is bound in a debt system that is out of control. As of January, global debt has climbed to a record $281 trillion, adding an unprecedented $24 trillion in 2020 for corona measures. It looks like this is all part of the Great Reset plan: Blame China for what the BIS central bankers, the real gods of money have engineered since 2008.

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F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook” where this article was originally published. 

He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

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Seeds of Destruction: Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation

Author Name: F. William Engdahl

ISBN Number: 978-0-937147-2-2

Year: 2007

Pages: 341 pages with complete index

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This skilfully researched book focuses on how a small socio-political American elite seeks to establish control over the very basis of human survival: the provision of our daily bread. “Control the food and you control the people.”

This is no ordinary book about the perils of GMO. Engdahl takes the reader inside the corridors of power, into the backrooms of the science labs, behind closed doors in the corporate boardrooms.

The author cogently reveals a diabolical world of profit-driven political intrigue, government corruption and coercion, where genetic manipulation and the patenting of life forms are used to gain worldwide control over food production. If the book often reads as a crime story, that should come as no surprise. For that is what it is.

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***

The efficacy of the RT-PCR test used to identify infection by the SARS-CoV-2 virus and ”cases” of the Covid-19 disease is widely disputed. In these discussions it is often maintained that the test produces 97% false positives. Reference for that claim is made to a study by a Marseille-based group who communicated their results in a letter to the editor on September 28th, 2020.[1]

The first author is R. Jaafar, so it is hereafter referred to as the Jaafar-paper. It represents an expanded data set compared to an earlier study[2] spearheaded by B. La Scola. This publication is referred to as the La Scola-paper.

In sum, the results presented in the Jaafar-paper do not provide a stand-alone proof for the test producing 97% false positives. The present comment is an attempt to distil the essential conclusions from their data.

In the semi-public domain, it has been another matter of confusion that the abbreviation “RT-PCR” is sometimes referred to as “Reverse Transcriptase Polymerase Chain Reaction”, while in other cases one may see it explained as “Real Time PCR”.

It is both. It is Real Time RT-PCR.

The enzyme reverse transcriptase addresses single-stranded RNA fragments in the swab and converts them into double-stranded DNA in a series of steps. Thereafter, the polymerase enzyme begins to make copies of selected DNA. The selection is determined by a pair of so-called primers which are necessary for initiating the process.

The replication occurs in cycles. Each cycle begins by heating the sample in order to separate the DNA double-helix into two free DNA strands. These serve as templates for the polymerase to produce complementary strands of each out of the building blocks present in the soup. Upon cooling the strands recombine. The cycle has ended. The result is a doubling of the number of DNA molecules present prior to the cycle.

During production the DNA is tagged by a probing molecule which fluoresces only when it is incorporated into the DNA. Thus, the sample emits visible light when irradiated with a little laser. The fluorescence intensity is recorded for each cycle of the PCR as a measure of the amount of DNA being produced. That is where the real-time comes in. When a pre-determined level is reached, the multiplication process is stopped and the test termed “positive”.

The number of cycles needed to produce the critical level of fluorescence is called the cycle threshold, Ct, which is a characteristic of each sample. Obviously, if the process starts with a huge number of RNA-fragments, the threshold fluorescence intensity is reached early and the Ct is low. If the initial loading is only a few RNA molecules, or maybe even a single piece, it may take many cycles to get the critical fluorescence signal.

This means that the Ct–value has the potential to provide a quantitative measure for the viral load of any person. It can be convenient if you want a quantitative measure for your temporary condition.

A future conversation may go like this:

“How do you do?”

“I went to the test center. They told me, that I feel fine. I have a Ct of 42 today.”

As will be understood from the following, this exchange may imply that person #2 had a cold last fall but no clinical symptoms today.

All samples are positive if 60 cycles are applied because “PCR makes something out of nothing”, as Kary Mullis – the Nobel Prize-winning inventor of the PCR technology – once said.

When it is only a matter of cycles before the test is positive, we must all have DNA and/or RNA fragments – foreign or domestic – in our body, which are targeted by the primers in current use. At high Ct values you end up amplifying “the background molecular noise” of benign genetic fragments.

We all have a CT all the time!

The Jaafar-paper is a contribution to the important discussion of the therapeutic utility of the PCR methodology. More specifically: “What is the tipping point for Ct below which a PCR provides a meaningful test for Covid-19 and above which it is meaningless”?

From the beginning of the Covid-19 outbreak until the research being wrapped up in said publication the Marseille institute performed 250,566 SARS-CoV-2 tests for 179,151 patients.

Of these, 13,161 tested positive within 35 cycles of the RT-PCR. That is 7.3%.

Out of these positive samples, 3790 were inoculated and managed for culture. The process of inoculation is more-or-less described in the La Scola-paper.2

They write, that “0.5 mL swab fluid was centrifuged and inoculated onto VERA cells (monkey kidney cell line) and observed for cytopathogenic effect” – in an undisclosed number of days.

That is, did the cells die and disintegrate? This observation must have been done under an optical microscope. If they observed cell death a liquid sample was taken from the vial and processed accordingly for observation in a scanning electron microscope.

The authors call this “Presumptive detection of virus in supernatant showing cytopathogenic effect.”

In translation, this means: “If we see the monkey cells die and disintegrate in the optical microscope we take the sample to the electron microscope and believe that whatever we see there, must be the virus.”

However, no electron microscope pictures were provided.

The presence of virus is further “confirmed” with RT-PCR on said liquid. Very importantly, the Ct values for these RT-PCRs run on the samples subjected to electron microscopy are not provided. If the DNA/RNA selected by the primers before and after inoculation targeted the same virus, the latter Ct’s should be substantially lower than the Ct’s obtained from the raw swabs.

If they were not, we really do not know why the cells died.

But let us assume for now that cell death is a criterion for a successful inoculation and that the deaths are caused by the same virus being quantified in the RT-PCR test.

Thus, Jaafar et al. report that the inoculation was successful in 1941 cases out of the 3790 PCR-positives being managed for culture.
This leads us to the immediate assessment that 49% of the positive PCR-tests may have been false in the sense, that the viral load of the patient must have been insignificant.

Whether the 51% successfully inoculated samples do represent a positive diagnosis for the disease called Covid-19 depends on whether SARS-CoV-2 really is a singular entity and whether it has been isolated and shown to be the pathogen of the disease.

In this evaluation we therefore reserve the term “positive” to a sample reaching the critical fluorescence threshold. The “positives” comprise the inoculable and the non-inoculable samples (which are false positives).

The data from the Jaafar-paper are reproduced in Figure 1. It shows the distribution between inoculable and non-inoculable samples for each group of Ct’s, ranging from 11 (Ct11) to 37 (Ct37) cycles.

True, the inoculables comprise only 3% of the Ct35-group. But since there were only 74 samples needed to be taken that far, it does not mean, that the RT-PCR test produces 97% false positives overall. The picture is more diverse.

Figure 1. From Jaafar et al. Shows inoculable samples (brown) together with non-inoculable (grey) for each Ct.

The same data are displayed in a more traditional manner in Figure 2.

Figure 2. Same data as Figure 1, displayed traditionally. The black line represents how many samples are subjected to cell culture at each Ct-group.

We seek an answer to the question: How many cycles should be standard if we want 80% of the positives to represent an inoculable sample?

Figure 3. Top: Integration of #inculables and #non-inculables curves in Figure 2. That is, sum of inoculable and non-inoculable, respectively, registered up until a given Ct. Bottom: Same, as percentage of sum of cultured samples at Ct.

In figure 3 (top), the number of inoculables and non-inoculables, respectively, are summed up to the Ct value. That is, the curves in figure 2 are integrated.

In Figure 3 (bottom) the same data are displayed as percentage of the total number of cultured samples up until that Ct.

It is seen that at Ct25, 80% of the samples termed “positive” by the RT-PCR test will be inoculable. However, 20% of the “positives” will be false, if inoculation is a bench-mark for efficacy of the RT-PCR. Some may find that to be a fair trade off.

So, if 1) there exists such a thing as a singular SARS-CoV-2 virus, if 2) this virus causes serious respiratory symptoms, if 3) the virus is inoculable in VERA cells, if 4) VERA cells are a valid representation of human ditto, and if 5) the Corman-Drosten test really detects SARS-CoV-2 specifically, it MAY have some benefit for a doctor in a clinical setting with a patient having serious respiratory symptoms to run an RT-PCR until Ct = 25 as a supplementary test.[3]

A bit far out, isn’t it?

It really boils down to the primers, their specificity and applicability at low concentrations. How can they target a fatal SARS-CoV-2 virus when its very existence remains to be demonstrated? Furthermore, the sequences of the various primers being used are found not only in ca. 100 bacteria but are also abundant in the human genome.[4][5]

Pairing of two DNA strands – hybridization – doesn’t have to be perfect to occur. If the two strands are, say, only 80% complementary, the binding constant will be reduced. But hybridization happens nevertheless. When a vastly exaggerated concentration of primers are used in the standard Corman-Drosten test[6] it is deliberately bound to pick up other DNA floating around, whether these have been produced by the reverse transcriptase or not.[7]

An RT-PCR test run at CT25

What outcome can be expected IF the Corman-Drosten test did detect a thing called SARS-CoV-2 and was operated at maximum of 25 cycles?

Figure 4. Top: Sum of RT-PCR positives managed for culture up until the Ct-group (integration of black line in figure 2). Bottom: Same data displayed as % of total sum positives managed for culture (3790).

Consider in Figure 4 (top) how the total number of cultured samples increases partly linearly with the number of cycles. This is in agreement with the notion, that the number of cultured per Ct-group reaches a plateau beyond Ct ~ 20 (figure 2) but only noteworthy if the selection of samples subjected to culture was random.

Of this sub-group (3790) subjected to culture – selected among those termed positive by the RT-PCR test within 35 cycles – only 1813 would have been registered as positives had only 25 cycles been applied (Figure 4, top), corresponding to 48% of the sub-group (Figure 4, bottom).

Since 7.3% were tested positive by RT-PCR within 35 cycles, it can be expected that 7.3 x 0.48 = 3.5% will be returned as positives if the number of cycles is confined to 25.

Of these, 2.8% may be trustworthy (80% according to inoculation) while 0.7% may be false positives – IF inoculation is a valid means of confirmation and all other conditions are met!

Closing remark

To be sick is to have symptoms. If you are not sick, you are not contagious. It used to be common sense that you are healthy unless you are not.

Sense is not common anymore during the alleged Covid-19 pandemic. Now you are sick until proven healthy – and contagious by default. The vehicle for this scam is the RT-PCR test run at >35 cycles and beyond. Stop testing and survive.

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Niels Harrit is Associate Professor of Chemistry (retired) at the University of Copenhagen. He was first author of the groundbreaking paper Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe

Notes

[1] Correlation Between 3790 Quantitative Polymerase Chain Reaction–Positives Samples and Positive Cell Cultures, Including 1941 Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 Isolates.

[2] Viral RNA load as determined by cell culture as a management tool for discharge of SARS-CoV-2 patients from infectious disease wards.

[3] WHO Information notice for IVD users.

[4] The scam has been confirmed: PCR does not detect SARS-CoV-2, philosophers-stone.info.

[5] Conversations with Tom Cowan, at 18.13.

[6] Detection of 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) by real-time RT-PCR

[7] Review report Corman-Drosten et al. Eurosurveillance 2020.

Featured image is from OffGuardian

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***

Christopher J. Portier, Ph.D., former director of the National Center for Environmental Health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR), and a scientific advisor for the World Health Organization (WHO), recently completed an expert report on brain tumor risk from exposure to radio frequency (RF) radiation used in cellphone technology.

After completing a comprehensive review of the scientific literature, Dr. Portier concluded:

“In my opinion, RF exposure probably causes gliomas and neuromas and, given the human, animal and experimental evidence, I assert that, to a reasonable degree of scientific certainty, the probability that RF exposure causes gliomas and neuromas is high.”

In 2011, Dr. Portier was selected to represent the CDC on an expert working group convened by the WHO International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) to review the carcinogenicity of RF radiation. Based upon recommendations of the expert panel, the IARC declared RF radiation “possibly carcinogenic to humans” (Group 2B) and the following year issued a monograph summarizing the evidence. Because the preponderance of the peer-reviewed research published since 2011 supports the need to upgrade this classification, the IARC has prioritized a new review to be conducted by 2024.

Dr. Portier’s 176-page expert report including 443 references was prepared for the plaintiffs in a major product liability lawsuit, Murray et al. v Motorola, Inc. et al., filed in the Superior Court for the District of Columbia against the telecommunications industry. The report appears as Exhibit 3 in a recent filing with the Court.

Christopher J. Portier. Expert Report. Exhibit C. Murray et al. v. Motorola, Inc. et al. Superior Court for the District of Columbia. March 1, 2021. pp. 1-176.

The report can be downloaded here.

Summary Statements from the Expert Report

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4.1.5 Conclusions for Gliomas (p. 51)

“The evidence on an association between cellular phone use and the risk of glioma in adults is quite strong. While there is considerable difference from study to study on ever versus never usage of cellular phones, 5 of the 6 meta-analyses in Figure 1. are positive and two are significantly positive. Once you consider latency, the meta-analyses in Figure 2 clearly demonstrate an increasing risk with increasing latency. The exposure response meta-regressions in Table 10 and Table 11 clearly indicate that risk is increasing with cumulative hours of exposure, especially in the highest exposure groups. There is a strong tendency toward gliomas appearing on the same side of the head as the phone is generally used and the temporal lobe is strongly suggested as a target. These findings do not appear to be due to chance. The cohort studies appear to show less of a risk than the case-­control studies, but one study is likely to be severely impacted by differential exposure misclassification (Frei et al., 2007) and the other (Benson et al., 2012) is likely to have a milder differential exposure misclassification. The case-control studies are possibly impacted by recall bias although that issue has been examined in a number of different evaluations. Selection bias could have been an issue for the lnterphone study, but their alternative analysis using different referent groups reduces that concern. Confounding is not an issue here. In conclusion, an association has been established between the use of cellular telephones and the risk of gliomas and chance, bias and confounding are unlikely to have driven this finding. The ecological studies are of insufficient strength and quality to fully negate the findings from the observational studies.

The data in children is insufficient to draw any conclusions.”

4.2.5 Conclusions for Acoustic Neuromas (p. 72)

“The evidence on an association between cellular phone use and the risk of acoustic neuromas [ANs] in adults is strong. While there is considerable difference from study to study on ever versus never usage of cellular phones, 3 of the 4 meta-analyses in Figure 3 are above 1 although none-significantly. The meta-analyses in Figure 4 demonstrate an increased risk in the highest 2 latency groups for the case-control studies that gets slightly higher when the cohort studies are added. For latency >=5 years, the mRRs are significantly elevated for the case-control studies and the combined case-control and cohort studies. The exposure response meta-regressions in Table 19 indicates that risk is increasing with cumulative hours of exposure, especially in the highest exposure groups. This finding, however, is sensitive to the inclusion of the Hardell et al. (2013) [160] study. There is a strong tendency toward ANs appearing on the same side of the head as the phone is generally used, especially as the exposure increases. These findings do not appear to be due to chance. The cohort studies appear to show less of a risk than the case-control studies, but one study is likely to be severely impacted by differential exposure misclassification (Schuz et al. (2011) [99]) and the other (Benson et al. (2013) [102]) is likely to have a milder differential exposure misclassification. Both studies have very few cases. The case-control studies are possibly impacted by recall bias and this cannot be ruled out for the ANs. Selection bias could have been an issue for lnterphone (2010) [67], and, unlike their analysis of the glioma data, they have not looked at an alternate referent population for their analyses of AN. Confounding is not an issue here. In conclusion, an association has been established between the use of cellular telephones and the risk of ANs and chance and confounding are unlikely to have driven this finding. Potential recall bias and selection bias may still be an issue with some of these findings.”

5.5. Summary and Conclusions for Laboratory Cancer Studies (p. 86-88)

“The central question to ask of animal cancer studies is “Can RF increase the incidence of tumors in laboratory animals?” The answer, with high confidence, is yes. Table 20 summarizes the findings from the chronic exposure carcinogenicity studies for RF.

For rats, the NTP (2018) [177] chronic exposure bioassay in male Sprague-Dawley rats, including in-utero exposure, is clearly positive for acoustic neuromas of the heart, malignant gliomas of the brain and pheochromocytomas of the adrenal gland. These findings are further supported by the presence of preneoplastic lesions and tissue toxicity in the heart, brain glial cells and adrenal glands. The less convincing findings in the study by Falcioni et al. (2018) [178] of heart acoustic neuromas in male Sprague-Dawley rats and a marginal increase in malignant gliomas in females provides additional support for this finding….

In conclusion, there is sufficient evidence from these laboratory studies to conclude that RF can cause tumors in experimental animals with strong findings for gliomas, heart Schwannomas and adrenal pheochromocytomas in male rats and harderian gland tumors in male mice and uterine polyps in female mice. There is also some evidence supporting liver tumors and lung tumors in male and possibly female mice.”

6. Mechanisms Related to Carcinogenicity (p. 91)

“There is sufficient evidence to suggest that both oxidative stress and genotoxicity are caused by exposure to RF and that these mechanisms could be the reason why RF can induce cancer in humans.”

7. Summary of Bradford Hill Evaluations (p. 109)

“RF exposure probably causes gliomas and acoustic neuromas, and given the human, animal and experimental evidence, I assert that, to a reasonable degree of scientific certainty, the probability that RF exposure causes these cancers is high.” 

Table 22: Summary conclusion for Hill’s nine aspects of epidemiological data and related science (p. 110-111)

Final Conclusion (p. 111)

“In my opinion, RF exposure probably causes gliomas and neuromas and, given the human, animal and experimental evidence, I assert that, to a reasonable degree of scientific certainty, the probability that RF exposure causes gliomas and neuromas is high.”

*

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The Belgrade Forum for a World of Equals, the Club of Generals and Admirals of Serbia and a number of other independent, non-partisan, non-profit organizations have been continuously marking March 24th 1999, the date of the beginning of NATO military aggression since the year 2000 to date, organizing commemorative ceremonies, domestic and international conferences, laying wreaths at the memorials dedicated to the victims of aggression, publishing books, releasing statements, and reminding friends and partners in the country and abroad to also take part in these activities. This makes a distinct part of the overall commemorative activities of the Serbian society and, as of lately, of the state institutions of Serbia as well. This year’s activities had to be in line with the measures effected due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

The first and the foremost reason is the sense of moral duty towards human victims, military, police and civilian ones alike, because all of them are innocent victims fallen on the soil of their own country from the foreign aggressor’s weapons. The aggression itself took between 3,500 – 4,000 human lives, of whom more than 1,100 were military and police personnel, whereas the rest comprised civilians, women and children, workers, the public TV-broadcaster’s employees, passengers in trains and busses, displaced people on the move. The numbers of those who died after the armed aggression, firstly from among some 10,000 wounded, then of those who perished from the scattered cluster bombs, and of those who succumbed to consequences of the use of missiles filled with depleted uranium and of the poisoning by noxious gasses generated upon the bombing of refineries and chemical plants, are yet to be determined. We remember them all today and pay our deepest homage. We are confident that today’s youth and all future generations will also remember those victims, aware of this remembrance being the moral duty of entire nation, a precondition for preserving dignity and peaceful future.

The second reason is to defend the truth, to leave no room for forgeries, lies and trickeries aimed, then and now, to diminish the aggressor’s responsibility by inculpating the victim. This is why we have to clarify that the NATO war was neither an intervention, nor an aerial campaign, nor a “small Kosovo war”, not even a mere bombing, but instead an illegal aggression committed without a United Nations Security Council’s approval, blatant violation of the UN Charter, the OSCE Final Act, the fundamental principles of international law and, most notably, violation of the NATO Founding Act of 1949 and respective national constitutions of the latter’s member states. This was the first war on European soil since World War II, waged against an independent and sovereign state which neither attacked nor otherwise threatened either NATO or any of its individual member states.

Thus, NATO inflicted a heavy blow to the legacies of World War II and of the agreements reached in Tehran, Yalta, Potsdam and Helsinki. Its aggression on Serbia (the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia) in 1999 undermined the basic principles of international relations and the security system, for which tens of millions of people were killed. March 24rth, 1999 has entered history as a turning point in the world relation symbolizing the peak of uni-polar domination, the beginning of its downfall and emerging multi-polar world order. Not once, we heard that by launching attack on Yugoslavia NATO and its leading power wanted to preserve its international credibility. What came as the result was just the opposite.

The aggressor wanted the war by all means, not any peaceful and sustainable solution for Kosovo and Metohija, the least to protect human rights or avoidance of “humanitarian catastrophe”. It wanted a war to justify NATO’s existence in the post-Cold War era and enormous budget appropriations for armaments, that is, the huge profits for military-industrial complex. NATO wanted a war to demonstrate in practice implementation of the doctrine of expansion to the East, to Russian boarders and also to create a precedent for the globalization of armed interventionism devoid of observance of international law and the role of the UN Security Council.

It was cover-up for deployment of American troops in the Balkan Peninsula an mushrooming of a chain of the new USA military basis from Bond Steel in the province of Kosovo and Metohija to a dozen of other bases from Black to Baltic Seas. Europe sank deep conceding to participate in a war on itself. The fact that Europe still fails to put focus on itself, its own interests and identity, while pressuring Serbia to accept forcible theft of a part of her state territory (Kosovo and Metohija) and agree to the Dayton Agreement’s revision and the creation of a unitary Bosnia and Herzegovina, only testifies to a worrying syndrome of the past now threatening its independence, unity, and development.

Thirdly, because we do not assent to defeatism and propensity of some media from the so-called non-governmental sector and some public figures who interpret NATO aggression in a way that reduces the aggressor’s responsibility, while suggesting that Serbia, in the name of a purported realism and for the sake of a “better future”, should shelve the topic of aggression and ‘relieve herself’ of Kosovo and Metohija as of a burden choking her progress. However, NATO’s responsibility for aggression and alliance with the terrorist and separatist KLA cannot be reduced in any way, the least of all could it be transferred onto Serbia. This would be shameful for Serbia and the Serbian people, and very detrimental for Europe and the future of global relations. The future of Europe’s identity, autonomy, security and cooperation is highly dependent on reexamining 1999 aggression on Yugoslavia, accepting it was historic mistake. Otherwise it will continue to seriously hinder its own interests.

Although devoted to Europe, Serbia cannot pay the price of re-establishing perturbed unity of the EU and NATO and/or of pursuing geopolitical goals of their key members, by means of renouncing Kosovo and Metohija, her state, cultural, and spiritual foundation. I am confident that Serbia will remain committed to a peaceful, just, and sustainable solution in line with the basic principles of peace, security and cooperation, while observing her Constitution and UN Security Council Resolution 1244. By far largest share of humanity has come to understanding that there are no humanitarian wars or wars to protect population. “Colored revolutions” and cruising missiles do not help ‘export’ democracy and human rights but rather serve interests of domination of liberal multinational corporate capital. In contrast to whatever the policy of force and the self-proclaimed ‘exceptionality’ may presume, history cannot be halted, nor uni-polarity reincarnated.

Fourthly, we are deeply concerned over the unending escalation of global relations, the arms race, the absence of dialogue among the leading powers and the deepening of mistrust among the key stakeholders in European and global relations. Public denominating of nuclear powers and permanent UN Security Council members as adversaries, plans to create ‘democratic coalitions’ aimed at confrontation with ‘authoritarian systems’, mass-scale military exercises deployed from the Atlantic and Baltic to the Indo-Pacific to ‘contain’ the ‘malign influences’ – signal a serious deterioration of global relations and risk unpredictable consequences. All this does not concern the great powers only, although is mostly dependent on them, but also reflects adversely on the position and development of all countries in the world, including also the position of Serbia and other small and medium size countries. As peace is indivisible, so are the dangers to peace and security. Hence we call on the dialogue on the highest level of permanent members of UN Security Council, urgent relaxation tensions, halt of deepening mistrust, respect for equality and partnership in resolving main urgent international challenges and problems, such as Covid 19 pandemic, deepening global economic and social gaps, climate warming, arms race and many of actual or potential conflicts.

Fifthly, because we do not want to witness a repeat of the anguish, victims, and devastation suffered by our nation during and after NATO’s 1999 aggression ever, anywhere in the world. The tragic destiny of children in Belgrade, Varvarin, Korisha, Kosovska Mitrovica, Murino, must not be repeated.

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Živadin Jovanović is President of the Belgrade Forum for a World of Equals. he is a frequent contributor to global Research. 

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Let’s start with comic relief: the “leader of the free world” has pledged to prevent China from becoming the “leading” nation on the planet. And to fulfill such an exceptional mission, his “expectation” is to run again for president in 2024. Not as a hologram. And fielding the same running mate.

Now that the “free world” has breathed a sigh of relief, let’s return to serious matters – as in the contours of the Shocked and Awed 21st Century Geopolitics.

What happened in the past few days between Anchorage and Guilin continues to reverberate. As Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov stressed that Brussels “destroyed” the relationship between Russia and the EU, he focused on how the Russia-China comprehensive strategic partnership is getting stronger and stronger.

Not so casual synchronicity revealed that as Lavrov was being properly hosted by Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Guilin – scenic lunch in the Li river included -, US Secretary of State Tony Blinken was visiting NATO’s James-Bondish HQ outside Brussels.

Lavrov made it quite clear that the core of Russia-China revolves around establishing an economic and financial axis to counterpunch the Bretton Woods arrangement. That implies doing everything to protect Moscow and Beijing from “threats of sanctions by other states”; progressive de-dollarization; and advances in crypto-currency.

This “triple threat” is what is unleashing the Hegemon’s unbounded fury.

On a broader spectrum, the Russia-China strategy also implies that the progressive interaction between the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) will keep apace across Central Asia, Southeast Asia, parts of South Asia, and Southwest Asia – necessary steps towards an ultimately unified Eurasian market under a sort of strategic Sino-Russo management.

In Alaska, the Blinken-Sullivan team learned, at their expense, that you don’t mess with a Yoda such as Yang Jiechi with impunity. Now they’re about to learn what it means to mess with Nikolai Patrushev, head of the Russian Security Council.

Patrushev, as much a Yoda as Yang Jiechi, and a master of understatement, delivered a not so cryptic message: if the US created “though days” for Russia, as they “are planning that, they can implement that”, Washington “would be responsible for the steps that they would take”.

What NATO is really up to

Meanwhile, in Brussels, Blinken was enacting a Perfect Couple routine with spectacularly inefficient head of the European Commission (EC) Ursula von der Leyen. The script went something like this. “Nord Stream 2 is really bad for you. A trade/investment deal with China is really bad for you. Now sit. Good girl.”

Then came NATO, which put on quite a show, complete with an all-Foreign Minister tough guy pose in front of the HQ. That was part of a summit – which predictably did not “celebrate” the 10th anniversary of NATO’s destruction of Libya or the major ass-kicking NATO “endured” in Afghanistan.

In June 2020, NATO’s cardboard secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg – actually his US military handlers – laid out what is now known as the NATO 2030  strategy, which boils down to a Global Robocop politico-military mandate. The Global South has (not) been warned.

In Afghanistan, according to a Stoltenberg impervious to irony, NATO supports infusing “fresh energy into the peace process”. At the summit, NATO ministers also discussed Middle East and Northern Africa and – with a straight face – looked into “what more NATO could do to build stability in the region”. Syrians, Iraqis, Lebanese, Libyans, Malians would love to learn something about that.

Post-summit, Stoltenberg delivered a proverbially somnolent press conference where the main focus was – what else – Russia, and its “pattern for repressive behavior at home, aggressive behavior abroad”.

All the rhetoric about NATO “building stability” vanishes when one examines what’s really behind NATO 2030, via a meaty “recommendation” report written by a bunch of “experts”

Here we learn the three essentials:

1. “The Alliance must respond to Russian threats and hostile actions (…) without a return to ‘business as usual’ barring alterations in Russia’s aggressive behavior and its return to full compliance with international law.”
2. China is depicted as a tsunami of “security challenges”: “The Alliance should infuse the China challenge throughout existing structures and consider establishing a consultative body to discuss all aspects of Allies’ security interests vis-à-vis China”. The emphasis is to “defend against any Chinese activities that could impact collective defense, military readiness or resilience in the Supreme Allied Commander Europe’s (SACEUR) Area of Responsibility.”
3. “NATO should outline a global blueprint (italics mine) for better utilizing its partnerships to advance NATO strategic interests. It should shift from the current demand-driven approach to an interest-driven approach (italics mine) and consider providing more stable and predictable resource streams for partnership activities. NATO’s Open Door Policy should be upheld and reinvigorated. NATO should expand and strengthen partnerships with Ukraine and Georgia.”

Here’s to The Triple Threat. Yet the Top of the Pops – as in fat, juicy industrial-military complex contracts – is really here:

The most profound geopolitical challenge is posed by Russia. While Russia is by economic and social measures a declining power, it has proven itself capable of territorial aggression and is likely to remain a chief threat facing NATO over the coming decade.  

NATO may be redacting, but the master script comes straight from the Deep State – complete with Russia “seeking hegemony”; expanding Hybrid War (the concept was actually invented by the Deep State); and manipulating “cyber, state-sanctioned assassinations, and poisonings – using chemical weapons, political coercion, and other methods to violate the sovereignty of Allies.”

Beijing for its part is using “force against its neighbors, as well as economic coercion and intimidatory diplomacy well beyond the Indo-Pacific region. Over the coming decade, China will likely also challenge NATO’s ability to build collective resilience.”

The Global South should be very much aware of NATO’s pledge to save the “free world” from these autocratic evils.

The NATO interpretation of “South” encompasses North Africa and the Middle East, in fact everywhere from sub-Saharan Africa to Afghanistan. Any similarity with the presumably defunct “Greater Middle East” concept of the Dubya era is not an accident.

NATO insists this vast expanse is characterized by “fragility, instability, and insecurity” – of course refusing to disclose its own role as serial instability perpetrator in Libya, Iraq, parts of Syria and Afghanistan.

Because ultimately…it’s all Russia’s fault: “To the South, the challenge includes the presence of Russia and to a lesser extent China, exploiting regional fragilities. Russia has reinserted itself in the Middle East and the Eastern Mediterranean. In 2015, it intervened in the Syrian Civil War and remains there. Russia’s Middle East policy is likely to exacerbate tensions and political strife across the region as it extends an increasing amount of political, financial, operational, and logistical assets to its partners. China’s influence across the Middle East is also growing. It signed a strategic partnership with Iran, is the largest importer of crude oil from Iraq, wedged itself into the Afghanistan peace process, and is the biggest foreign investor in the region.”

Here, in a nutshell, and not exactly in code, is the NATO road map all the way to 2030 to harass and try to dismantle every relevant nook and cranny of Eurasia integration, especially those directly linked to New Silk Roads infrastructure/connectivity projects (investment in Iran, reconstruction of Syria, reconstruction of Iraq, reconstruction of Afghanistan).

The spin is on a “360-degree approach to security” that will “become an imperative”. Translation: NATO is coming for large swathes of the Global South, big time, under the pretense of “addressing both the traditional threats emanating from this region like terrorism and new risks, including the growing presence of Russia, and to a lesser extent China.”

Hybrid war on two fronts

And to think that in a not so distant past there used to be some flashes of lucidity emanating from the US establishment.

Very few will remember that in 1993 James Baker, former Secretary of State under Daddy Bush, advanced the idea of expanding NATO to Russia, which at the time, under Yeltsin and a gang of Milton Friedmanesque free marketeers, was devastated, but ruled by “democracy”. Yet Bill Clinton was already in power, and the idea was duly discarded.

Six years later, no less than George Kennan – who invented the containment of the USSR in the first place – determined that the NATO annexation of former Soviet satellites was “the beginning of a new Cold War” and “a tragic mistake”.

It’s immensely enlightening to relieve and re-study the whole decade between the fall of the USSR and the election of Putin to the presidency through the venerable Yevgeny Primakov’s book Russian Crossroads: Toward the New Millenium,  published in the US by Yale University Press.

Primakov, the ultimate intel insider who started as a Pravda correspondent in the Middle East, former Foreign Minister and also Prime Minister, looked closely into Putin’s soul, repeatedly, and liked what he saw: a man of integrity and a consummate professional. Primakov was a multilateralist avant la lettre, the conceptual instigator of RIC (Russia-India-China) which in the next decade evolved towards BRICS.

Those were the days – exactly 22 years ago – when Primakov was on a plane to Washington when he picked up a call by then Vice-President Al Gore: the US was about to start bombing Yugoslavia, a slav-orthodox Russian ally, and there was nothing the former superpower could do about it. Primakov ordered the pilot to turn around and fly back to Moscow.

Now Russia is powerful enough to advance its own Greater Eurasia concept, which moving forward should be balancing – and complementing – China’s New Silk Roads. It’s the power of this Double Helix – which is bound to inevitably attract key sectors of Western Europe – that is driving the Hegemon’s ruling class dazed and confused.

Glenn Diesen, author of Russian Conservatism: Managing Change Under Permanent Revolution, which I analyzed in  Why Russia is Driving the West Crazy , and one of the best global analysts of Eurasia integration, summed it all up: “The US has had great difficulties in terms of converting the security dependence of the allies into geoeconomic loyalty, as evident by the Europeans still buying Chinese technologies and Russian energy.

Hence permanent Divide and Rule, featuring one of its key targets: cajole, force, bribe and all of the above for the European Parliament to scotch the China-EU trade/investment deal.

Wang Yiwei, director of the Center for European Studies at Renmin University and author of the best made in China book about the New Silk Roads, clearly sees through the “America is back” bluster: “China is not isolated by the US, the West or even the whole international community. The more hostility they show, the more anxiety they have. When the US travels around the globe to frequently ask for support, unity and help from its allies, this means US hegemony is weakening.”

Wang even forecasts what may happen if the current “leader of the free world” is prevented from fulfilling his exceptional mission: “Don’t be fooled by the sanctions between China and the EU, which is harmless to trade and economic ties, and EU leaders won’t be that stupid to totally abandon the China-EU Comprehensive Agreement on Investment, because they know they would never get such a good deal when Trump or Trumpism returns to the White House.”

Shocked and Awed 21^st Century Geopolitics, as configured in these crucial past two weeks, spells out the Unipolar Moment is six feet under. The Hegemon will never admit it; hence the NATO counterpunch, which was pre-designed. Ultimately, the Hegemon has decided not to engage in diplomatic accommodation, but to wage a hybrid war on two fronts against a relentlessly demonized strategic partnership of peer competitors.

And as a sign of these sorry times, there’s no James Baker or George Kennan to advise against such folly.

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This article was originally published on Asia Times.

Pepe Escobar, born in Brazil, is a correspondent and editor-at-large at Asia Times and columnist for Consortium News and Strategic Culture in Moscow. Since the mid-1980s he’s lived and worked as a foreign correspondent in London, Paris, Milan, Los Angeles, Singapore, Bangkok. He has extensively covered Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia to China, Iran, Iraq and the wider Middle East. Pepe is the author of Globalistan – How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War; Red Zone Blues: A Snapshot of Baghdad during the Surge. He was contributing editor to The Empire and The Crescent and Tutto in Vendita in Italy. His last two books are Empire of Chaos and 2030. Pepe is also associated with the Paris-based European Academy of Geopolitics. When not on the road he lives between Paris and Bangkok.

He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from http://nousnatobases.org

All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

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Secretary of State Anthony Blinken’s address at North Atlantic Treaty Organization headquarters in Brussels on March 24, entitled Reaffirming and Reimagining America’s Alliances, is a landmark, a watershed articulation of the most far-ranging and perhaps the final initiative of the West to preserve and extend world domination; a crusade inaugurated by the U.S. and the thirty-member global military bloc it leads to bifurcate the world into the West and, to use the words of Zbigniew Brzezinski, its partners, vassals and tributaries on one hand and a small handful of incorrigible holdouts against the order Blinken represents on the other. The second group of countries being, if you will, the foreign policy equivalent of Neanderthals and deplorables as those terms have been employed in the American body politic over the past five years.

Despite more than the usual quotient of vapid, saccharine and unctuous words – shared values of democracy and human rights, the right of all people everywhere to be treated with dignity and have their fundamental freedoms respected, the global commons, a world with greater health, stronger democracies, and more opportunity for more people, opportunities for their families and communities, a free and open rules-based order, our ability and willingness to openly confront our own shortcomings, stand up for the free and open system that we know provides the best conditions for human ingenuity, dignity, and connection, we need to have a positive vision that can bring people together in common cause (all direct quotes) – when the dross is removed his words are chilling to an alarming degree.

And not only in reference to issuing a blanket diktat to the world to submit to the U.S. and NATO rules-based international order (their collective catchphrase) but a domestic equivalent of it for nationals as well as nations. Neanderthals can be nations and individuals alike.

On the international plane, Blinken yet further escalated the broadsides he and his American and NATO colleagues have been launching against Russia and China to a steadily intensifying degree of late.

Not long into his speech he almost gratuitously introduced lines like “an increasingly assertive China,” then proceeded to promote the nation from a pesky competitor to a military threat. As Blinken also obligatorily made reference to NATO’s Article 5 collective military assistance clause, for him to accuse a nation of posing a threat to the U.S. and its allies is a grave accusation indeed. But he hardly limited the number of alleged threats posed by China to its assertive behavior. Nor was he sparing of Russia.

In one paragraph he laid out the alliance’s writ of indictment against both China and Russia for posing a threat to the “international system” no less. Of a multitude of threats the modern equivalent of the Cold War’s free world faces –

“The first is military threats from other countries. We see this in China’s efforts to threaten freedom of navigation, to militarize the South China Sea, to target countries throughout the Indo-Pacific with increasingly sophisticated military capabilities. Beijing’s military ambitions are growing by the year. Coupled with the realities of modern technology, the challenges that once seemed half a world away are no longer remote. We also see this in the new military capabilities and strategies Russia has developed to challenge our alliances and undermine the rules-based order that ensures our collective security. These include Moscow’s aggression in eastern Ukraine; its build-up of forces, large-scale exercises, and acts of intimidation in the Baltic and Black Sea, the Eastern Mediterranean, the High North; its modernization of nuclear capabilities; and its use of chemical weapons against critics on NATO soil.“

The two global malefactors were then lumped into the same category as Iran and North Korea, with the last two “pursuing nuclear and missile capabilities that threaten U.S. allies and partners,” as a quadripartite Eurasian Axis of Evil.

The sweep of subject matter – all more or less consisting of existential threats (to leave no cliché unused) to the unoffending, congenitally trusting West – and unsparing denunciations directed at the targeted offenders in the speech put Winston Churchill’s Iron Curtain address at Fulton, Missouri in 1946 in the shade as they say.

Not relenting, hardly pausing for breath, Blinken took further jabs at China and Russia for issues as far away from military threats as imaginable; for example: “From China’s blatant economic coercion of Australia, to Russia’s use of disinformation to erode confidence in elections and in safe, effective vaccines – these aggressive actions threaten not only our individual countries, but also our shared values.”

The two “authoritarian” (NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg’s standard adjective for them) nations are also lambasted for the “use of disinformation campaigns and weaponized corruption to fuel distrust in our democracies, and cyberattacks that target our critical infrastructure and steal intellectual property.”

To respond to the virtually all-encompassing threats he detailed, he first recommended what would be the absolute ultima ratio regum of options – nuclear weapons – in stating “we must ensure that our strategic nuclear deterrent remains safe, secure, and effective, particularly in light of Russia’s modernization.”

As for China, in addition to mentioning working with U.S. and NATO partners Japan and South Korea, he touted employing “the group of countries we call ‘the Quad’ – Australia, India, Japan, and the United States,” adding that President Biden recently hosted the first-ever “leader-level summit” of that anti-Chinese alliance. Incidentally, Blinken referred to the current administration as the Biden-Harris administration, the first time an American government has been identified in that manner.

He also celebrated “deepening NATO-EU cooperation,” emphasizing that the European Union joined the U.S., Britain and Canada in leveling sanctions against China over “the atrocities being committed against Uyghurs in Xinjiang.”

As nations not willing to toe the line of the rules-based international order must be confronted and defeated, so must the citizens within countries not prepared to sacrifice their sovereignty and dignity to a neoliberal supranational order; even those in NATO nations who display their disloyalty to the new order by voting the wrong way. Because, Blinken stated, “Our shared values of democracy and human rights are being challenged – not only from outside our countries, but from within.” He trumpeted the need to “confront the democratic recession around the world.”

Readers will supply their own parallels for political regimes that exclusively focus on portraying themselves being mercilessly threatened by and needing to relentlessly counterattack underhanded, insidious adversaries both at home and abroad; regimes for which that dual accusation serves both as raison d’être and preferred method of deflecting attention from their own ineptitude, their own crimes. An individual exhibiting such violent delusions of persecution would be diagnosed a paranoid schizophrenic. A dangerous one. A distinct threat to himself and others.

As seen above, China and Russia are not only “undermin[ing] the rules-based order,” but China in particular is “now actively working to undercut the rules of the international system,” China and Russia both are in various devious ways ” erod[ing] confidence in elections,” sowing “distrust in our democracies” and threatening the monopoly of American and other Western vaccine manufacturers.

It’s no secret that in the past twenty years Euro-Atlantic elites have been displeased with the results of federal elections around the world (as in the monarchical We are not amused); in NATO countries themselves such results have occurred at various times in Slovakia, Poland, Italy, Hungary, Lithuania, the Czech Republic and even the U.S. once. Any nation, any official, any voter who questions the transcendent sublimity of Atlanticism will be eliminated.

The reason that Slovakia was not included in NATO’s first round of post-Cold War expansion with its Visegrad Four partners in 1999 and had to wait five more years to enter the alliance is because Slovaks had the temerity to vote the wrong way. NATO, the U.S. and the EU bore the People’s Party – Movement for a Democratic Slovakia (ĽS-HZDS) of Vladimír Mečiar an abiding animus. Only after he and his party had been swept aside could Slovakia join the NATO “alliance of democracies.” Mečiar threw in the towel in 2000 when he saw that his nation had been punished sufficiently for his putative sins. His HZDS colleague Augustín Marián Húska said at the time: “The NATO war against Yugoslavia in 1999 was also a signal to us, to not pursue any vision of political independence anymore. We have seen what will happen to forces that want to be independent.”

This month marks the twenty-second anniversary of NATO’s war against Yugoslavia. The message to the world about the new post-Cold War order was delivered with bombs and Tomahawk cruise missiles. By NATO.

Rick Rozoff is a geopolitical analyst and frequent contributor to Global Research

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All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

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“If behavioral psychologists helped to shape the government’s strategy on mass vaccination, then in what other policies were they involved? Were these the “professionals” who conjured up the pandemic restrictions? Were the masks, the social distancing and the lockdowns all promoted by “experts” as a way to undermine normal human relations and inflict the maximum psychological pain on the American people? Was the intention to create a weak and submissive population that would willingly accept the dismantling of democratic institutions and the imposition of a new political order? These questions need to be answered.” (From the text)

Let’s assume for a minute, that the vaccination campaign is led by people who genuinely want to end the current crisis and restore the country to “normal”. Let’s also assume, that they believe that mass vaccination is the best way to achieve that objective by preventing the spread of the virus and, thus, reducing the death toll. Is that sufficient justification for silencing vaccine critics and conducting a nation-wide brainwashing operation aimed at controlling public opinion?

No, it’s not. People need to hear both sides of the story, in fact, that’s the only way they can make an informed decision about how they wish to proceed. The media has no right to commandeer the airwaves and control whatever people hear and see. And they have no right to deliberately exclude the medical professionals and other experts whose views conflict with the official narrative. The only way that people can offer their informed consent for vaccination, is if they’re able to weigh the risks and benefits for themselves. But that’s only possible if they have access to many diverse sources of information which, at present, they don’t. Increasingly, the only message that most people hear is the one that is provided by the government in collaboration with industry honchos and other elites. Traditionally, this type of state media is called “propaganda” which is a term that certainly applies here.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out how this has affected the debate on vaccines, namely, there isn’t one. The skeptics have been dismissed as antivaxx loonies while an entirely new regime of experimental vaccines is being praised as a “miracle drug”. At the same time, the government –which has aligned itself with the industry it’s supposed to regulate– is doing everything in its power to pressure people into getting vaccinated. What we’re seeing is the most extravagant Madison Avenue “product launch” in America’s 245-year history, and it’s coming at us full-throttle from all sides. It’s virtually impossible to turn on the TV or radio without being deluged by one emotive vignette after the other all of which are aimed at promoting vaccination. How does this respect the right of the individual to make his own informed decision free from government coercion?

It doesn’t. This is flagrant indoctrination and yet no one talks about it. It’s shocking. Have you noticed how the critics of the mRNA vaccines have been prevented from expressing their views in the media? Have you noticed how the doctors, scientists, virologists, epidemiologists and public health experts have all been blocked from appearing on the cable news channels or excluded from the nation’s leading newspapers? Have you noticed how these critics been attacked on social media, censored on FaceBook and removed from Twitter? Have you noticed the lengths to which the media has gone to eliminate any challenge to the “official narrative” and to denounce, ridicule or blacklist anyone who dares to offer a conflicting opinion?

Why? Why is the media preventing these experts from articulating their reservations to the American people directly?

It’s obvious, isn’t it? It’s because the people that are managing this campaign don’t want anything that veers from the “official narrative”. They don’t want people thinking for themselves, they don’t want people searching alternate websites that challenge the new prevailing doctrine on vaccines, they don’t want people who read the details about the trials or the medical journals or the research papers. They don’t want you to question their motives, or weigh the risks and benefits of getting vaccinated. They don’t want you to notice that their vaccine never completed long-term trials or met the normal standards for product safety. They don’t want you to consider the fact that mRNA is a relatively new technology with a checkered past that includes some very disturbing animal trials in which all the animals died. They don’t want you to think about any of this. They want you to shut up, stand in line, turn off your brain, and roll up your sleeve. And, anyone who disagrees with that sentiment, is being censored.

Am I being unfair?

That’s not my intention. And –believe it or not– my intention is not to criticize the vaccines themselves, but the manner by which they are being shoved down our throats. That, I object to strongly because it violates the people’s right to informed consent. A lopsided, nationwide public relations blitz that relentlessly glorifies vaccines while deliberately excluding even the slightest criticism from respected professionals, does not respect the rights of the people. It’s brainwashing, pure and simple.

And why have behavioral psychologists been employed by the government to promote the vaccination campaign? Why have they concocted a strategy designed “to change people’s beliefs and feelings about vaccination” to inform “people about the prosocial benefits of vaccination”, and to “intervene on behavior directly”, which means that you’re given an appointment, and told that you will be getting your vaccination at the end of the session.” Psychologists call this a “presumptive recommendation” which effectively eliminates the element of personal choice by creating a scenario in which getting vaccinated is a fait accompli. How is this not coercion?

It is coercion, subconscious coercion. The doctor is strong-arming the patient into getting vaccinated by making it look like its standard procedure. That puts pressure on the patient to follow the path of least resistance, which is compliance. It’s a clever tactic, but it is also transparently manipulative.

The behavioral psychologists who have helped to shape the government’s policy, believe that the emphasis should be placed on the “safety and effectiveness” of the vaccines. That’s the cornerstone for building public support. At the same time, they show no interest in providing evidence that would support their claims, which suggests that “safe and effective” is nothing more than a meaningless bromide that is invoked to dupe the sheeple into getting inoculated.

You might have also heard the term “vaccine hesitancy” used to describe the people who have decided not to get vaccinated. The moniker is clearly intended to denigrate vaccine skeptics by suggesting that they have a mental condition, like paranoid schizophrenia. This is an effective way to discredit one’s enemies, but it also shows the glaring weakness of the pro-vaccine position. If the proponents of vaccination had something of substance to offer, they would rely on facts and data rather than ad hominin attacks. As it happens, the facts do not support their position. Besides, “vaccine hesitancy” is not a character flaw or a mental condition, it’s the sign of someone who has taken responsibility for his own health and welfare. Ask yourself this: Why would a normal, rational person be eager to have an experimental cocktail injected into his bloodstream potentially triggering all manner of long-term ailments or death? Is that the choice a normal person would make?

As far as I can see, behavioral psychologists are playing a critical role in this mass vaccination campaign. According to a report put out by the National Institutes of Health, it appears that a rapid response team has been formed to attack the opinions of people who challenge the “official narrative”. Check out this blurb from the report titled “COVID-19 Vaccination: Communication: Applying Behavioral and Social Science to Address Vaccine Hesitancy and Foster Vaccine Confidence”:

Mitigate the impact of COVID-19-related misinformation…

The spread of health-related misinformation was a significant public health concern well before the COVID-19 pandemic. During the last decade, vaccine-related discourse online and in the media has been plagued by misinformation. Anti-vaccine groups have leveraged political and social divisions to diminish trust in vaccines, pushed false narratives questioning the safety and effectiveness of vaccines, spread false claims about adverse outcomes, and downplayed the risks of the disease’s vaccines protect against.….

COVID-19 vaccine communication efforts cannot ignore misinformation and must take actions, informed by behavioral and communication research, to identify emerging rumors and respond in a way that is informed by behavioral science. Real-time, agile, and scalable monitoring of discourse concerning COVID 19 vaccination—including conspiracy theories, rumors, and myths—can support a swiftly developed and implemented response. “Misinformation surveillance” efforts should identify the most prominent sources of misinformation, the tactics being used, and the groups most at risk of being exposed to and influenced by the rumors. This information, in addition to data regarding the dynamics and patterns of misinformation spread, could help inform the appropriate response and best targets for intervention efforts….

Correcting the false claim contained in the message, exposing the tactics used by disinformation agents, and inducing skepticism by highlighting the ulterior motives of these actors are all potentially effective strategies for mitigating the impact of misinformation…” (“COVID-19 Vaccination* Communication: Applying Behavioral and Social Science to Address Vaccine Hesitancy and Foster Vaccine Confidence”, the National Institutes of Health)

Repeat: “Misinformation surveillance”… “disinformation agents”… “the ulterior motives of these actors“??

Really? Now who’s sounding paranoid?

This is very scary stuff. Agents of the state now identify critics of the Covid vaccine as their mortal enemies. How did we get here? And how did we get to the point where the government is targeting people who don’t agree with them? This is way beyond Orwell. We have entered some creepy alternate universe.

Here’s more on the topic from a statement by Arthur C. Evans Jr., PhD, CEO of the American Psychological Association, in response to the approval by an advisory panel of the Food and Drug Administration of a vaccine against COVID-19:

“We recognize that there are pockets of resistance to vaccines, distrust of the medical establishment and misinformation about vaccines generally….Some populations are understandably less likely to accept vaccinations due to a legacy of mistrust rooted in unethical public health practices.

“It is critical that leaders across the political spectrum unite behind messages of vaccine safety and transparency.” ..

Enlist credible spokespeople who can connect with diverse communities, especially those where mistrust and skepticism run high. When leaders talk about vaccines as standard practices, as opposed to options, people are more likely to accept them.Research suggests building trust and providing clear information about vaccines can improve vaccination uptake rates. It is critical that leaders across the political spectrum unite behind vaccine safety and transparency, clearly explaining what is in the vaccine and what it does and doesn’t do in the body.

Consider the wide variety of factors that motivate human behavior. Behavioral science indicates that people are more likely to adhere to vaccine recommendations when they believe they are susceptible to the illness, when they want to protect others, when they believe the vaccine is safe or at least safer than the illness, and when their concerns and questions are managed respectfully by doctors and experts.” (“APA Welcomes Step Toward First U.S. Vaccine Approval”, American Psychological Association)

Is it really ethical for the APA to be involved in a mass vaccination campaign? Is this the role an organization like this should play in a democratic society? Should the APA use its unique understanding of human behavior to persuade people on behalf of the government and big pharma? And, more importantly, if behavioral psychologists helped to shape the government’s strategy on mass vaccination, then in what other policies were they involved? Were these the “professionals” who conjured up the pandemic restrictions? Were the masks, the social distancing and the lockdowns all promoted by “experts” as a way to undermine normal human relations and inflict the maximum psychological pain on the American people? Was the intention to create a weak and submissive population that would willingly accept the dismantling of democratic institutions, the dramatic restructuring of the economy, and the imposition of a new political order?”

These questions need to be answered.

Surprisingly, the resistance to vaccination is nearly as strong today as it was a year ago. According to PEW Research:

(only) “69% of the public intends to get a vaccine – or already has….

Those who do not currently plan to get a vaccine (30% of the public) list a range of reasons why. Majorities cite concerns about side effects (72%), a sense that vaccines were developed and tested too quickly (67%) and a desire to know more about how well they work (61%) as major reasons why they do not intend to get vaccinated.

Smaller shares of those not planning to get a vaccine say past mistakes by the medical care system (46%) or a sense they don’t need it (42%) are major reasons why they don’t plan to get a vaccine; 36% of this group (11% of all U.S. adults) say a major reason they would pass on receiving a coronavirus vaccine is that they don’t get vaccines generally.

The new national survey by Pew Research Center, conducted Feb. 16 to 21 among 10,121 U.S. adults. (“Growing Share of Americans Say They Plan To Get a COVID-19 Vaccine – or Already Have“, PEW Research)

So, despite the nonstop propaganda blitz, a significant portion of the population remains unconvinced, unimpressed and steadfast. Go figure? Of course, this is just Round 1. Soon, persuasion will turn into coercion, and from coercion to outright force. It’s already clear that air-travel will require vaccine passports, and that public transit, concerts, libraries, restaurants and, perhaps, even grocery stores could follow soon after. Vaccination looks to be the defining issue of the next few years at least. And those who resist the edicts of the state will increasingly find themselves on the outside; outcasts in their own country.

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First published on February 3, 2021

Alarming News. In Germany (according to report) the Parliament (Bundestag) ratified on 29 January 2021, the implementation of Agenda ID2020.

Two months later: March 2021. And  now it’s the European Parliament. It’s the ‘Digital Green Pass’

This is a centralized general electronic data collection of every citizen to which every government agency, police – and possibly also the private sector would have access.

It covers all that is known about an individual citizen, now up to 200 points of in formation and possibly more as time goes on, from your bank account to your shopping habits, health records (vaccination records, of course), your political inclinations, and probably even your dating habits and other entries into your private sphere. 

Agenda ID2020 was designed by Bill Gates as part of the “vaccination package”. It is backed by the Rockefeller Foundation, Accenture, the WEF and GAVI (Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization, now simply called the Vaccine Alliance), also a Gates creation (2001), with HQ in Geneva, Switzerland.

GAVI is located next door to the WHO. GAVI is called a public private partnership,

The public part being WHO, plus a number of developing countries;

The private partners are, of course a series of pharmaceutical companies, i. e. Johnson & Johnson, GlaxoSmithKline, Merck & Co. … and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

The German extra-governmental Corona Commission, consisting of hundreds of medical doctors, virologists, immunologists, university professors – and lawyers, including Dr. Reiner Füllmich, co-founder of the Commission, has special concerns that the current Corona-Vaccines (Pfizer, Moderna), may include nano-particles that could be accessible to electro-magnetic radiation, i. e. 5G and the subsequent 6G. 

This is precisely what was foreseen in the design of Agenda ID2020, in which Bill Gates and GAVI had a major role, and in which case the ID2020 might be vaccine-implanted and be remote-accessible by EM-geared computers, robots or algorithms (see, in German “Wirkungsweise und Gefahren der aktuellen Corona-Impfungen in Deutschland mittels mit Nanopartikeln umhüllter mRNA-Impfstoffe – Corona Ausschuss Germany 37th Conference” (31 January 2021)

The adoption of Agenda ID2020 still has to be approved by the German Federal Council, but there is little chance the Council will reject it.

Agenda 2020 in Switzerland

Similarly, in Switzerland, Agenda ID2020 – an all-electronic ID – linking everything to everything of each individual citizen will come to a popular vote on 7 March 2021.

And that’s not all, the Swiss government wants to outsource management of Agenda ID 2020 to the private sector — unbelievable!!! – You imagine a bank or insurance company dealing (and selling) your data!!!! — Just imagine what will happen with your personal information – unthinkable.

In the longer-run – who knows how long – as foreseen by Bill Gates, the properties for an electronic ID – i. e. an electromagnetic field (EMF) – will be implanted in your body, either along with a vaccine – maybe it’s already happening with the covid jabs, or separately in the form of injectable nano-chips.

Early trials were carried out mid-last year in school classes of remote villages in Bangladesh.

With the complacent Swiss being what they are, it is very possible if not likely that the government’s proposal will be accepted on 7 March. Then what?

Is this the beginning of adopting the all-digitized Agenda ID2020 throughout Europe, the world?

Or – maybe other EU countries have already quietly and secretly – no questions asked – envisaged inserting the Agenda ID2020 in their Constitution.

For more details of Agenda ID 2020 – see below.

The Coronavirus COVID-19 Pandemic: The Real Danger is “Agenda ID2020”

By Peter Koenig, April 26, 2020

Once every citizen on the planet – according to Bill Gates – about 7 billion-plus will be ID-chipped, the control of a small globalist elite will be close to total.

With an electromagnetic field and with 5G / 6G EM-waves allowing inputs and access of data in your body – the control of each individual is almost complete. The “almost” refers to the planned access to your brainwaves.

This is supposed to be happening through a Brain Computer Interface (BCI), called Neurolink (https://neuralink.com/) – developed by Elon Musk. (see video)

It presents an interface of electronic waves with the human brain which, by then, will have been converted into an electromagnetic field (EMF), so that it can receive digital commands that will influence our behavior, or can be turned off – RIP – as may be is most convenient for the Global Cabal. 

Let’s not let this happen.

Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he has worked for over 30 years on water and environment around the world. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for online journals and is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and  co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020).

Peter Koenig is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

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There has been a massive backlash in the UK to a proposal to mandate COVID vaccinations to enter a pub, with one pub chain owner branding the idea “appalling” and “almost certainly illegal.”

As we highlighted yesterday, despite months of the government assuring the public that there would be no ‘domestic vaccine passport’, Boris Johnson told a committee,

“The concept of vaccine certification should not be totally alien to us” and said that it should be up to landlords on whether to enforce it.

During an appearance on told talkRADIO, Hugh Osmond, the founder of UK pub chain Punch Taverns, labeled the proposal “the most appalling idea” and said it was “almost certainly illegal.”

Hugh Osmond, founder of Punch Taverns, says allowing pubs to demand vaccine passports is “the most appalling idea” and “almost certainly illegal”.

“It would be incredibly discriminatory against young people who haven’t even been offered the vaccine yet”@JuliaHB1 | @hughosmond pic.twitter.com/wx02bBhDj2

— talkRADIO (@talkRADIO) March 25, 2021

Osmond also pointed out that innumerable people in their 20s and 30s would be discriminated against because they won’t be offered the vaccine for months.

Adam Brooks, a publican who runs several pubs, echoed that sentiment when he tweeted, “Anything but normal trading past June 21st is an utter DISGRACE. “Once every adult has been OFFERED vaccination, the Government & Health care system has done its job. Life has to return.”

. @toryboypierce
You honestly believe pubs that don’t mandate passports will struggle badly ?!
I was born into this industry and lived above pubs or owned them nearly all my life .
I can confidently tell you that couldn’t be further from the truth.
I WONT BE DOING THIS !

— Adam Brooks (@EssexPR) March 25, 2021

Kate Nicholls, the CEO of hospitality trade association UKHospitality, also blasted the idea as not “necessary or proportionate” and said it would “would put lots of businesses in a very difficult position.”

Steve Baker MP, deputy chairman of the COVID Recovery Group, warned that the domestic vaccine passport could extend to virtually every area of life.

“First they said we’ll need them to watch the football, and today that it may be papers for the pub.”

“Whether the state legislates for it, recommends it or simply allows it the result will be the same: a two-tier Britain that prevents pregnant women from taking part in society, given that the government is telling them not to take the vaccine.”

“Or one where we turn back the clock and tolerate businesses turning away customers from communities which have shown an unfortunate hesitancy to take up the offer of a vaccine.”

“We must not fall into this ghastly trap.”

Pete Tiley of the Salutation Inn told the Telegraph’s Adrian Tierney-Jones,

“Adding a vaccine passport check on top will create further hassle and aggravation, and will make going for a relaxing pint tougher than getting through airport security.”

However, Becky Newman at the Bricklayer’s Arms in Putney supported the idea, telling Tierney-Jones,

“I imagine it’s going to take a year or so for people to begin to feel relaxed again about being in public spaces. So, with this in mind, I think I am quite pro-vaccine passport. It feels quite community spirited.”

After a subsequent backlash on Twitter from her potential customers, Newman quickly changed her mind, stating, “General consensus from customers on Twitter so far is a big fat no!”

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Iran and China on Saturday signed a 25-year “strategic cooperation” agreement as Beijing expands its trillion-dollar Belt and Road Initiative.

“Our relations with Iran will not be affected by the current situation, but will be permanent and strategic,” Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi was quoted by Iranian news agencies as saying.

“Iran decides independently on its relations with other countries and is not like some countries that change their position with one phone call.”

Wang met President Hassan Rouhani before he and his Iranian counterpart, Mohammad Javad Zarif, signed the agreement, which is expected to include Chinese investments in key sectors such as energy and infrastructure.

Negotiations for the deal, started five years ago, sparked controversy in Iran last year over the purported secret nature of the proposed agreement, with virtually no details of its contents having been released.

Rouhani’s adviser, Hesameddin Ashena, said that the cooperation pact between the two allies is an example of “successful diplomacy”.

“A country’s strength is in its ability to join coalitions, not to remain isolated,” he was cited by Iranian media as saying.

Saeed Khatibzadeh, an Iranian foreign ministry spokesman, said the document was a “roadmap” for trade, economic and transportation cooperation, with a “special focus on the private sectors of the two sides”.

China is Iran’s largest trading partner and was one of the biggest buyers of Iranian oil before then US president Donald Trump reimposed unilateral sanctions in 2018 after abandoning a nuclear agreement with Tehran and world powers.

In 2016, China agreed to increase bilateral trade by more than 10 times to $600bn over a decade.

Its commerce ministry said on Thursday that Beijing will try to safeguard the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, to which it is party, and defend the legitimate interests of its relations with Iran.

US President Joe Biden hopes to revive the nuclear deal, but the process has been stalled, with Tehran and western powers remaining at odds over which side should return to the agreement first.

Iran says that Washington must first lift all economic sanctions it imposed, while Biden has insisted that Tehran must first reverse steps taken to reduce its commitments under the agreement in response to the sanctions.

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This article was originally published on GR in May 2017.

Almost 10 years ago (on 20 October 2011), President Muammar Muhammad Abu Minyar al-Gaddafi, of Libya was brutally killed by NATO troops, instigated by then Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton of the Obama Administration and supported by Joe Biden, then Vice President – today President of the United States.

Libya was a bustling economy, where people had free education, free health care, free housing – and where their President, Muammar Gaddafi, a visionary, wanted to help Africa out of western dependence and neo-colonial oppression, making Africa a sovereign Continent, with a sovereign monetary system, detached from the Bank of France and the Bank of England, controlling its own resources and its own monetary resouces.

Gaddafi was NOT a human rights abuser, as the west and western media conveniently painted him. To the contrary, Gaddafi was a leader for the people of Libya and for Africa. He wanted Africa to be free. That was his sin. The real abusers, mostly France, the UK and the United States, couldn’t allow the resources richest Continent or the planet be independent. The west coveted these resources. 

So, they launched a NATO attack under false pretenses, on Libya and Gaddafi – and killed the one that could have liberated Africa from the fangs of western exploitation.

Today, Libya is a sad chaotic tribal state that can hardly be called a country. It has become a slave trading place under the watch of western powers. 

The criminals responsible for this misery are still free. One of them goes as far as accusing President Putin of being a “killer”, to which Mr. Putin rightly responds, “The one Who Accuses is the One Who Is”.

In fact, this minute group of super-wealthy and powerful oligarchs, pretend to run the world – and convert sovereign states into a One World Order, with a uniform culture, uniform language, uniform values, uniform monetary system, under a Globalist tyrannical cabal.

-Peter Koenig, March 28, 2021

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The Text below is the transcript of the interview between Alex Knyazev of Russia TV24 and Peter Koenig.  

Questions Russia TV24: What were the reasons Mr. Gaddafi was killed and NATO invaded Libya?

PK: Mr. Muammar Gaddafi was certainly not killed for humanitarian reasons.

Mr. Gaddafi wanted to empower Africa. He had a plan to create a new African Union, based on a new African economic system. He had a plan to introduce the ‘Gold Dinar’ as backing for African currencies, so they could become free from the dollar dominated western monetary system, that kept and keeps usurping Africa; Africa’s vast natural resources, especially oil and minerals. As a first step, he offered this lucrative and very beneficial alternative to other Muslim African states, but leaving it open for any other African countries to join.

At the time of Gaddafi’s atrocious murdering by Hillary Clinton, then Obama’s Secretary of State, and the French President Sarkozy, driven by NATO forces, on 20 October 2011 – Libya’s gold reserves were estimated at close to 150 tons, and about the same amount of silver. The estimated value at that time was US$ 7billion.

It’s your guess who may have stolen this enormous treasure from the people of Libya. As of this date, it is nowhere to be found.

Gaddafi also wanted to detach his oil sales from the dollar, i.e. no longer trading hydrocarbons in US dollars, as was the US / OPEC imposed rule since the early 1970s. Other African and Middle Eastern oil and gas producers would have followed. In fact, Iran had already in 2007, a plan to introduce the Tehran Oil Bourse, where anyone could trade hydrocarbons in currencies other than the US dollar. That idea came to a sudden halt, when Bush (George W) started accusing Iran of planning to build a nuclear bomb which was, of course a fabricated lie, confirmed by the 16most prominent US security agencies- and later also by the UN body for nuclear safety – the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), in Vienna. Washington needed a pretext to stop the Tehran Oil Bourse which would have decimated the need for dollars, and thereby most probably would have meant the end of the dollar hegemony.

Saddam Hussein had the same idea. He promised as soon as the murderous and criminal embargo imposed by the UN – of course dictated by Washington – would end in 2000, he would sell his petrol in euros. He was killed.

Gaddafi’s new plan for Africa would have meant an entirely new banking system for Africa, away from the now western (mainly France and UK) central banks dominated African currencies. -It could have meant the collapse of the US dollar -or at least an enormous blow to this fake dollar based western monetary system.

So, the Gold Dinar was not to happen. Anybody – to this day- who threatens the dollar hegemony will have to die. That means anybody other than China and Russia, because they have already a few years ago largely detached their economy from the dollar, by implementing hydrocarbons as well as other international contracts in gold or the respective local currencies. That alone has already helped reducing dollar holdings in international reserve coffers from almost 90% some 20 years ago to a rate fluctuating between 50% and 60% today.

The also Washington / CIA induced “Arab Spring” was to turn the entire Middle East into one huge chaos zone- which today of course, it is. And there are no plans to secure it and to return it to normalcy, to what it was before. To the contrary, chaos allows to divide and conquer – to Balkanize, as is the plan for Syria and Iraq. One of the Washington led western goals of this chaos of constant conflict is to eventually install a system of private central banks in the Middle Eastern / North African countries controlled by Washington – privately owned central banks, à la Federal Reserve (FED), where the neocons, the Rothschilds and freemasonry would call the shots. That is expected to help stabilize the US dollar hegemony, as the hydrocarbons produced in this region generate trillions of dollars in trading per year.

Gaddafi also wanted to introduce, or had already started introducing into Africa a wireless telephone system that would do away with the US / European monopolies, with the Alcatels and AT and T’s of this world, which dominate and usurp the African market without scruples.

Gaddafi was not only the leader of Libya, he had ambitions to free Africa from the nefarious fangs of the west. Despite being called a dictator and despot by the west – they do that to anyone who doesn’t submit to Washington’s rules – he was very much liked by Libyans, by his people. He had a more than 80% approvalrate by the Libyan people. Libya’s oil fortune has allowed him to create a social system in his country where everybody would benefit from their land’s riches – free health care, free education, including scholarships abroad, modern infrastructure, top-notch technology in medicine, and more.

Russia TV24: Why the gold dinar would be unacceptable for the western leaders? Or not?

PK: Yes, the gold Dinar was totally unacceptable for western leaders. It might have devastated the US dollar hegemony, as well as Europe’s control over the African economy – which is nothing less than neo-colonization of Africa – in many ways worse than what happened for the past 400 or 800 years of murderous military colonization and oppression -which is by the way still ongoing, just more discretely.

Look at the Ivory Coast 2010 presidential elections. Theirarguably ‘unelected’ President, Alassane Ouattara (picture on the right), was in a tie with the people’s candidate, Laurent Gbagbo. Gbagbo said he won the election and asked for a recount which was denied. Ouattara, a former IMF staff, was pushed in, basically by ‘recommendation’ of the IMF. He is the darling of the neoliberal international financial institutions – and is leading a neocon government – an economy at the service of western corporations. That’s what they wanted. That’s what they got. Modern colonization is well alive and thriving. I call this a financial coup, instigated by foreign financial institutions.

Mr. Laurent Gbagbo was accused of rape, murder and other atrocities and immediately transferred to the International Criminal Court (sic-sic) – what justice? – in The Hague, where he was waiting five years for a trial which started on 28 January 2016 and is ongoing. On 15 May 2017, it was extended at the Prosecutor’s request to collect further evidence. This by all likelihood is just a farce to dupe the public into believing that he is getting a fair trial. Already in hearings in 2014, Gbagbo was found guilty of all charges, including murder, rape and other crimes against humanity. Like Slobodan Milošević, he is an inconvenient prisoner, or worse would he be as a free man. So, he will most likely be locked away – and one day commit ‘suicide’ or die from a ‘heart attack’.  The classic. That’s how the west does away with potential witnesses of their atrocious crimes. End of story. Nobody barks, because the ‘free world’has been made believe by the western presstitute media that these people are inhuman tyrants. That’s precisely what the western media’s headlines proclaimed about Muammar Gaddafi: Death of a Tyrant.

On the other hand, in 2015, Ouattara was “reelected by a landslide”. That’s what western media say. Colonization under African ‘leadership’. He is protected by the French army.

Back to Libya: Take the specific case of France and West and Central Africa. The French Central Bank, the Banque de France, backs the West and Central African Monetary Union’s currency, the CFA franc. The West African Central Bank, for example, is covered, i.e. controlled, by about 70% of the Banque de France. Banque de France has an almost total control over the economy of its former West African colonies. No wonder, Sarkozy, a murderer and war criminal – sorry, it must be said, backed Hillary’s – also a murderer and war criminal, push for NATO to destroy the country and kill thousands of Libyans, including Libya’s leader, Muammar Gaddafi. Hillary’s infamous words: ‘We came we saw he died’. And that she said shamelessly, jokingly, laughing. Would the term human being still apply to such a monster?

Russia TV24: What countries are mostly interested in the Libyan recovery and why? What are the chances for the economy of Libya to be repaired?

PK: Well, if anybody should be interested in Libya’s recovery it would be first the Libyans who are still living in Libya, because they are now living in a Libya of chaos and high crime, of mafia-economics, of tyranny by gang leadership. They certainly have an interest to return to normalcy. North African neighboring countries should also be interested in restoring order and rebuilding Libya’s infrastructure and economy, stopping the spill-over of high crime and terrorism. They have lost an important trading partner.

Of course, the rest of Africa, who have suffered from continuous colonization of the west, after Gaddafi’s demise, should also be interested in reestablishing Libya. They know,it will never be the same Libya that was there to help their economy, to help them prying loose from the western boots and fangs of exploitation.

And Europe -should be most interested in reestablishing order and a real economy in Libya- cleaning it from a murderous Mafia that promotes drugs and slave trade ending up in Europe. Libya today is one of the key hubs for the boat refugees from Africa to Europe.Instead of helping Libyans to come to peace within its borders and to rebuild their country, the European Commission launched in 2015 a new European Border and Coast Guard Agency, targeting specifically Libya – destroying refugee boats, if they cannot stop them from leaving Tripoli, Benghazi and other Libyan Sea ports.

Of course, spineless Europe doesn’t dare saying they would like to remake Libya into a functional state.Libya is Washington’s territory – and Washington wants chaos to continue in Libya.As such Libya is a formidable ground for training and recruitment of terrorists, drug and slave trading; a country where crime prospers and the CIA takes their cut, as these criminal activities are directed by the CIA and their affiliates. The rest of the world doesn’t see that. For them it’s all the fault of the dictator Gaddafi, who thanks goodness was eliminated by the western powers, lords of money and greed.

Russia TV24: Decades ago Libya was very successful from an economic point of view. What main things could you remember?

PK: Libya was economically and socially a successful country, arguably the most successful of Africa. Prosperity from oil was largely shared by Gaddafi with his countrymen. Libya had a first-class social safety net, an excellent transportation infrastructure, free medical services, and modern hospitals, equipped with latest technology medical equipment, free education for everyone – and students could even receive scholarships to study abroad.

Under President Gaddafi, Libya built friendly relations based on solidarity with other African States and was always ready to help if a ‘brother nation’ was in trouble. Gaddafi was a bit like Hugo Chavez in South America. He had a large heart and charisma, maybe not so much for western leaders, but certainly for Libya’s own population. Yet, he is accused of tyranny by the West, and is said to having financially supported Sarkozy’s Presidential campaign – Sarkozy, the very ‘leader’ (sic-sic),who then helped Hillary lynch Gaddafi. If that doesn’t say a lot about Europe’s criminal leaders – what will?

Muammar Gaddafi was accused by Washington – an accusation immediately repeated by the spineless European puppets, of being responsible for the December 1988 PanAm Flight 103 bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland. More than 240 people perished in the crash. Not a shred of evidence was discovered that Libya was behind the plot. But it was a good reason to start a program of sanctions against Gaddafi’s regime. It was most likely a false flag. What interest would anybody have to bring down that flight, other than clamping down on an oil-rich country.

Russia TV24: Now we see oil production has grown to at least 50% of the 2011 level. Can we expect it to continue growing and affecting the oil market?

PK: Yes, Libyan oil production has increased to about 50% of its 2011 level. Libya is known for her high premium light petrol, commanding premium prices. It is a market niche which might well be affected by Libya’s stepped up production. But who really benefits from this production increase? – Most likely not the Libyans, but the international corporations, mostly American and French oil giants. They call the shots on the production levels. They are part of the international cartel of oil price manipulators, as are the Wall Street banksters,predominantly Goldman Sachs.

Russia TV24: The sanctions against Libya are lifted and all barriers for foreign investments have disappeared as well. Does it mean the county will face recovery soon?

PK: Sanctions may be lifted, but that does not mean that foreign investments will now flow to Libya. The country is still under chaos and disarray – and in my opinion will stay so in the foreseeable future. That’s in Washington’s interest.Investors are reluctant to put their money into a crime nest and a terrorist breeding ground which is working closely with Washington and its secret services – to provide terrorists to fight US-proxy wars around the Middle East, for example in Syria and Iraq – and now even in Afghanistan – and who knows where else.

Russia TV24: How do you assess the political situation in the country today?

PK: As much as I would like to end on a positive note, it is difficult. As long as the CIA, chief instigator of all wars in the Middle East, is using the purposefully created Libyan chaos to train and recruit Islamic State fighters, Al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups which vary only in name but have the same objective – namely regime change in Syria – prospects for a foreseeable bright future are dim.

Of course, a lot depends on the unpredictable Trump Presidency. Will he seek peace in the Middle East? – That would be the surprise of the Century – or will he continue on the track dictated by the Deep State (not least to save his skin) – continue destruction of the Middle East, Balkanization of Syria – all as a stepping stone to Full Spectrum Dominance – as is written in the American Bible – the PNAC – Plan for a New American Century – which outlines the ‘American Pax Romana’. They were the bloodiest 200 – 300 years of the Roman Empire. Here comes the positive note: It is unlikely that the American empire will last that long. It’s on its last legs.When it finally falters, Libya may recover, and so may the rest of the world.

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Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he has worked for over 30 years on water and environment around the world. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for online journals and is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and  co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020).

He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

First published by Global Research on September 24, 2020, this analysis of former Pfizer V-P Michael Yeadon has been the object of censorship.

In a stunning development, a former Chief Science Officer for the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer says “there is no science to suggest a second wave should happen.”

The “Big Pharma” insider asserts that false positive results from inherently unreliable COVID tests are being used to manufacture a “second wave” based on “new cases.”

Dr. Mike Yeadon, a former Vice President and Chief Science Officer for Pfizer for 16 years, says that half or even “almost all” of tests for COVID are false positives. Dr. Yeadon also argues that the threshold for herd immunity may be much lower than previously thought, and may have been reached in many countries already.

In an interview last week Dr. Yeadon was asked:

“we are basing a government policy, an economic policy, a civil liberties policy, in terms of limiting people to six people in a meeting…all based on, what may well be, completely fake data on this coronavirus?”

Dr. Yeadon answered with a simple “yes.”

Dr. Yeadon said in the interview that, given the “shape” of all important indicators in a worldwide pandemic, such as hospitalizations, ICU utilization, and deaths, “the pandemic is fundamentally over.”

Yeadon said in the interview:

“Were it not for the test data that you get from the TV all the time, you would rightly conclude that the pandemic was over, as nothing much has happened. Of course people go to the hospital, moving into the autumn flu season…but there is no science to suggest a second wave should happen.”

In a paper published this month, which was co-authored by Yeadon and two of his colleagues, “How Likely is a Second Wave?”, the scientists write:

“It has widely been observed that in all heavily infected countries in Europe and several of the US states likewise, that the shape of the daily deaths vs. time curves is similar to ours in the UK. Many of these curves are not just similar, but almost super imposable.”

In the data for UK, Sweden, the US, and the world, it can be seen that in all cases, deaths were on the rise in March through mid or late April, then began tapering off in a smooth slope which flattened around the end of June and continues to today. The case rates however, based on testing, rise and swing upwards and downwards wildly.

Media messaging in the US is already ramping up expectations of a “second wave.”

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Survival Rate of COVID Now Estimated to be 99.8%, Similar to Flu, Prior T-Cell Immunity

The survival rate of COVID-19 has been upgraded since May to 99.8% of infections. This comes close to ordinary flu, the survival rate of which is 99.9%. Although COVID can have serious after-effects, so can flu or any respiratory illness. The present survival rate is far higher than initial grim guesses in March and April, cited by Dr. Anthony Fauci, of 94%, or 20 to 30 times deadlier. The Infection Fatality Rate (IFR) value accepted by Yeadon et al in the paper is .26%. The survival rate of a disease is 100% minus the IFR.

Dr. Yeadon pointed out that the “novel” COVID-19 contagion is novel only in the sense that it is a new type of coronavirus. But, he said, there are presently four strains which circulate freely throughout the population, most often linked to the common cold.

In the scientific paper, Yeadon et al write:

“There are at least four well characterised family members (229E, NL63, OC43 and HKU1) which are endemic and cause some of the common colds we experience, especially in winter. They all have striking sequence similarity to the new coronavirus.”

The scientists argue that much of the population already has, if not antibodies to COVID, some level of “T-cell” immunity from exposure to other related coronaviruses, which have been circulating long before COVID-19.

The scientists write:

“A major component our immune systems is the group of white blood cells called T-cells whose job it is to memorise a short piece of whatever virus we were infected with so the right cell types can multiply rapidly and protect us if we get a related infection. Responses to COVID-19 have been shown in dozens of blood samples taken from donors before the new virus arrived.”

Introducing the idea that some prior immunity to COVID-19 already existed, the authors of “How Likely is a Second Wave?” write:

“It is now established that at least 30% of our population already had immunological recognition of this new virus, before it even arrived…COVID-19 is new, but coronaviruses are not.”

They go on to say that, because of this prior resistance, only 15-25% of a population being infected may be sufficient to reach herd immunity:

“…epidemiological studies show that, with the extent of prior immunity that we can now reasonably assume to be the case, only 15-25% of the population being infected is sufficient to bring the spread of the virus to a halt…”

In the US, accepting a death toll of 200,000, and an infection fatality rate of 99.8%, this would mean for every person who has died, there would be about 400 people who had been infected, and lived. This would translate to around 80 million Americans, or 27% of the population. This touches Yeadon’s and his colleagues’ threshold for herd immunity.

The authors say:

“current literature finds that between 20% and 50% of the population display this pre-pandemic T-cell responsiveness, meaning we could adopt an initially susceptible population value from 80% to 50%. The lower the real initial susceptibility, the more secure we are in our contention that a herd immunity threshold (HIT) has been reached.”

Masthead for “Lockdown Skeptics.org” publisher of “How Likely is a Second Wave?” | Source

The False Positive Second Wave

Of the PCR test, the prevalent COVID test used around the world, the authors write:

“more than half of the positives are likely to be false, potentially all of them.”

The authors explain that what the PCR test actually measures is “simply the presence of partial RNA sequences present in the intact virus,” which could be a piece of dead virus which cannot make the subject sick, and cannot be transmitted, and cannot make anyone else sick.

“…a true positive does not necessarily indicate the presence of viable virus. In limited studies to date, many researchers have shown that some subjects remain PCR-positive long after the ability to culture virus from swabs has disappeared. We term this a ‘cold positive’ (to distinguish it from a ‘hot positive’, someone actually infected with intact virus). The key point about ‘cold positives’ is that they are not ill, not symptomatic, not going to become symptomatic and, furthermore, are unable to infect others.”

Overall, Dr. Yeadon builds the case that any “second wave” of COVID, and any government case for lockdowns, given the well-known principles of epidemiology, will be entirely manufactured.

In Boston this month, a lab suspended doing coronavirus testing after 400 false positives were discovered.

An analysis of PCR-based test at medical website medrxiv.org states:

“data on PCR-based tests for similar viruses show that PCR-based testing produces enough false positive results to make positive results highly unreliable over a broad range of real-world scenarios.”

University of Oxford Professor Carl Heneghan, Director of Oxford’s Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine, writes in a July article “How Many COVID Diagnoses Are False Positives?”:

“going off current testing practices and results, Covid-19 might never be shown to disappear.”

Of course, the most famous incidence of PCR test unreliability was when the President of Tanzania revealed to the world that he had covertly sent samples from a goat, a sheep, and a pawpaw fruit to a COVID testing lab. They all came back positive for COVID.

Made in China

In August, the government of Sweden discovered 3700 false COVID positives from test kits made by China’s BGI Genomics. The kits were approved in March by the FDA for use in the US.

Second Waves of Coronaviruses Not Normal

Dr. Yeadon challenged the idea that all pandemics take place in subsequent waves, citing two other coronavirus outbreaks, the SARS virus in 2003, and MERS in 2012. What may seem like two waves can actually be two single waves occurring in different geographical regions. They say data gathered from the relatively recent SARS 2003 and the MERS outbreaks support their contention.

In the case of the MERS:

“it is actually multiple single waves affecting geographically distinct populations at different times as the disease spreads. In this case the first major peak was seen in Saudi Arabia with a second peak some months later in the Republic of Korea. Analysed individually, each area followed a typical single event…”

In the interview, when questioned about the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918, which came in successive waves during World War I, Yeadon pointed out that this was an entirely different kind of virus, not in the coronavirus family. Others have blamed general early century malnutrition and unsanitary conditions. World War I soldiers, hard hit, lived in cold mud and conditions the worst imaginable for immune resistance.

Saudi and Korea Waves of MERS Coronavirus

Lockdowns Don’t Work

Another argument made by Yeadon et al in their September paper is that there has been no difference in outcomes related to lockdowns.

They say:

“The shape of the deaths vs. time curve implies a natural process and not one resulting mainly from human interventions…Famously, Sweden has adopted an almost laissez faire approach, with qualified advice given, but no generalised lockdowns. Yet its profile and that of the UK’s is very similar.”

Mild-Mannered Yeadon Demolishes Man Who Started It All, Professor Neil Ferguson

The former Pfizer executive and scientist singles out one former colleague for withering rebuke for his role in the pandemic, Professor Neil Ferguson. Ferguson taught at Imperial College while Yeadon was affiliated. Ferguson’s computer modelprovided the rationale for governments to launch draconian orders which turned free societies into virtual prisons overnight. Over what is now estimated by the CDC to be a 99.8% survival rate virus.

Dr. Yeardon said in the interview that “no serious scientist gives any validity” to Ferguson’s model.

Speaking with thinly-veiled contempt for Ferguson, Dr. Yeardon took special pains to point out to his interviewer:

“It’s important that you know most scientists don’t accept that it [Ferguson’s model] was even faintly right…but the government is still wedded to the model.”

Yeardon joins other scientists in castigating governments for following Ferguson’s model, the assumptions of which all worldwide lockdowns are based on. One of these scientists is Dr. Johan Giesecke, former chief scientist for the European Center for Disease Control and Prevention, who called Ferguson’s model “the most influential scientific paper” in memory, and also “one of the most wrong.”

It was Ferguson’s model which held that “mitigation” measures were necessary, i.e. social distancing and business closures, in order to prevent, for example, over 2.2 million people dying from COVID in the US.

Ferguson predicted that Sweden would pay a terrible price for no lockdown, with 40,000 COVID deaths by May 1, and 100,000 by June. Sweden’s death count is now 5800. The Swedish government says this coincides to a mild flu season. Although initially higher, Sweden now has a lower death rate per-capita than the US, which it achieved without the terrific economic damage still ongoing in the US. Sweden never closed restaurants, bars, sports, most schools, or movie theaters. The government never ordered people to wear masks.

Dr. Yeadon speaks bitterly of the lives lost as a result of lockdown policies, and of the “savable” countless lives which will be further lost, from important surgeries and other healthcare deferred, should lockdowns be reimposed, .

Yeardon is a successful entrepreneur, the founder of a biotech company which was acquired by Novartis, another pharmaceutical giant. Yeadon’s unit at Pfizer was the Asthma and Respiratory Research Unit. (Yeadon, partial list of publications.)

Sweden During International “Lockdowns”

Why is All This Happening? US Congressman Says He is Convinced of “Government Plan” to Continue Lockdowns Until a Mandatory Vaccine. Conspiracy Theories?

The list of news items grows which reflects unfavorably upon the narrative being played out on the major television networks, of a mysterious, “novel” virus which has been controlled only by an unprecedented assault on individual rights and liberties, now ready to pounce again, on already suffering populations with no choice but to submit to further government orders.

Governors have quietly extended their powers indefinitely by shifting the goalpost, without saying so, from “flattening the curve” to ease the strain on hospitals, to “no new cases.” From “pandemic,” to “case-demic.”

In Germany, an organization of 500 German doctors and scientists has formed, who say that government response to the COVID virus has been vastly out of proportion to the actual severity of the disease.

Evidence of chicanery mounts. Both the CDC, and US Coronavirus Task Force headed by Dr. Deborah Birx, are candid that the definition of death-by-COVID has been flexible, and that the rules favor calling it COVID whenever possible. This opens the possibility of a vastly inflated death count. In New York, Governor Andrew Cuomo’s administration is under federal investigation for all but signing the death warrants for thousands of nursing home elderly, when the state sent COVID patients into the nursing homes, over the helpless objections of nursing home executives and staff.

Why are the major media ignoring what would seem to be an eminently newsworthy item, an industry rockstar like Yeadon, calling out the biggest guns in the public health world? Would not the Sunday talk shows, the Chris Wallaces and Meet the Press, want to grill such a man for record audiences?

Here the talk may turn to dark agendas, and not just mere incompetence, obtuseness, and stupidity.

One opinion was put forth by US Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY) when he said on the Tom Woods Show on August 16th:

“The secret the government is keeping from you is that they plan to keep us shut down until there is some kind of vaccine, and then whether it’s compulsory at the federal level, or the state level, or maybe they persuade your employers though another PPP program that you won’t qualify for unless you make your employees get the vaccine, I think that’s their plan. Somebody convince me that’s not their plan, because there is no logical ending to this other than that.”

Another theory is that the COVID crisis is being used consolidate never-before-imaged levels of control over individuals and society by elites. This is put forth by the nephew of the slain president, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., son of also-assassinated Bobby Kennedy. In a speech at a massive anti-lockdown, anti-mandatory COVID vaccination rally in Germany, Bobby Jr. warned of the existence of a:

“bio-security agenda, the rise of the authoritarian surveillance state and the Big Pharma sponsored coup d’etat against liberal democracy…The pandemic is a crisis of convenience for the elite who are dictating these policies,”

In a lawsuit, Kennedy Jr.’s medical witnesses warn that mandatory flu shots many make children more susceptible to COVID.

The warnings of dire intentions of Kennedy’s “elite” are coming from more mainstream sources. Dr. Joseph Marcela, of the highly trusted, mega-traffic medical information site Mercola.com, has penned a careful review of one doctor’s claims of genetics-altering vaccines coming our way.

And it does not assuage fears that a defense establishment website, Defense One, reports that permanent under-the skin biochips, injectable by the same syringe that holds a vaccine, may soon be approved by the FDA. It does not help the anti-conspiracy theory cause that, according to Newsweek, Dr. Anthony Fauci actually did give NIH funding to Wuhan lab for bat coronavirus research so dangerous it was opposed on record by 200 scientists, and banned in the US.

In 1957, a pandemic hit, the H2N2 Asian Flu with a .7% Infection Fatality Rate, which killed as many people per capita in the US as the COVID has claimed now. There was never a single mention of it in the news at the time, never mind the extraordinary upheaval that we see now. In 1968 the Hong Kong Flu hit the US (.5% IFR,) taking 100,000 people when the US had a markedly lower population. Not single alarm was raised, not a single store closed nor even a network news story. The following summer the largest gathering in US history took place, Woodstock.

Mass hysteria is never accidental, but benefits someone. The only question left to answer is, who?

August Protest in Berlin Against Lockdown, and Against Mandatory COVID Vaccination| Source

Woodstock 1969

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Grassroots mobilization has led the Biden administration to pledge to end the war in Yemen; further activism is needed to make him follow through on his promise and to pressure Saudi Arabia to end its blockade

Six years ago, in the early hours of March 26, 2015, a military coalition led by Saudi Arabia and backed by the United States began a bombing campaign in Yemen.

Endorsed by the Obama-Biden administration as a sort of consolation prize to Saudi Arabia after signing the nuclear deal with Iran, the airstrikes and blockade imposed on Yemen have led to what the UN has described as the world’s largest humanitarian crisis.

With Biden now the president, activists have been able to secure important–if vague–promises from him to end U.S. complicity in the war.

The coming weeks present a unique and critical opportunity for holding his administration to the task.

[Source: google.com]

The Saudi-led coalition’s blockade on Yemen has spelled disaster for millions of Yemenis.

Death and Destruction

The war has caused approximately one-quarter of a million direct deaths. Additionally, in 2020 alone, 172,000 people were internally displaced, 79% of whom are women and girls. In total, approximately four million people have been displaced over the last six years.

Displaced family in Marib, Yemen. [Source: news.un.org]

Nearly three-quarters of the population is in need of humanitarian aid, and an estimated 13.5 million Yemenis are in a food emergency. In addition to violence and a looming famine, in 2020 alone, there have been 229,887 cases of cholera, approximately one-fourth of which have been children under five years old.

COVID has exacerbated conditions in Yemen: Only half of the healthcare system in Yemen is intact and, out of the country’s 333 districts, 67 have no doctor. Additionally, over the summer, Yemen had one of the highest COVID mortality rates in the world, at 27 percent, which is more than five times the global average.

A year ago, as the pandemic was striking Yemen, the Trump administration decided to suspend humanitarian assistance to northern Yemen where the majority of the Yemeni population lives.

On March 11, 2021, the press reported that the Biden administration will restore the assistance to northern Yemen, helping to save lives.

Fewer than two weeks earlier, however, on March 1, 2021, the UN Donor’s conference raised less than half of the UN’s necessary amount to provide services in Yemen. Aid is critical for the survival of thousands of Yemeni people, especially as a result of the pandemic.

Although the U.S. has at various points tried to distance itself from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) violent missions against civilians, the Pentagon has exponentially increased its arms sales to Saudi Arabia since the Kingdom began its airstrikes on Yemen.

In the five years before the war, the United States sold approximately $3 billion worth of arms to Saudi Arabia. However, in the first five years of the war (2015-2020), the U.S. agreed to sell to it more than $64.1 billion worth of arms.

[Source: inthesetimes.com]

Weapons made in the U.S. have been used in some of the deadliest attacks in Yemen including the bombing of a funeral hall in Sanaa, where at least 140 people were killed and 600 were injured, the bombing of the Mastaba market, where 97 were killed, including 25 children, and the bombing of a school bus, killing 40 children and wounding dozens.

Wreckage from Mastaba market in March 2016. The weapons used were made in the U.S. [Source: hrw.org]

By supplying the Saudi/Emirati-led coalition with these weapons, spare parts, and tactical and intelligence assistance, United States participation in this war has played a key role in perpetuating the humanitarian crisis.

Radhya al-Mutawakel, chairwoman of Mwatana for Human Rights, an organization that records violations from all sides of the war in Yemen, informed CNN that, “in more than one way and during more than one incident, remnants of American weapons have been found at the site of airstrikes that killed civilians.” The U.S. has now enabled this devastation for six years.

The United States government has long valued its alliance with Saudi Arabia as a strategic hedge against Iran, which has been accused of backing the Houthi rebels. Saudi Arabia is the top importer of U.S. weapons. It also sells the U.S. cheap oil and struck a deal years ago to sell its oil on the foreign market in U.S. dollars, which helps keep the latter as the world’s dominant currency.^[1]

Some experts have argued that an additional interest for the U.S. has been control of the strategically located island of Socotra off the coast of Yemen.

The nefarious nature of the Saudi regime has been exposed with the release of a report stating that U.S. intelligence found that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ordered the assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. This recent news has amplified calls for Saudi Arabia to be held accountable for its human rights abuses, including its involvement in Yemen, and for the West to stop weapons sales to the Kingdom.

President Biden’s decision to not penalize the Crown Prince was a major blow to human rights activists around the world. The decision may not be surprising, however, considering Saudi Arabia’s strategic value to the U.S., and in the opinion of CovertAction Magazine editors, Biden’s long history of supporting the U.S. overseas empire.

Growing Western Opposition to the War

During Biden’s campaign for President, he pledged to stop supporting the Saudi/Emirati-led aggression in Yemen and to stop selling arms to oppressive regimes such as Saudi Arabia.

Specifically, he promised to “end U.S. support for Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen, and make sure America does not check its values at the door to sell arms or buy oil.”

On January 25, 2021, Biden’s first Monday in office, tens of thousands of people around the world participated in online and on-the-ground protests as part of a Global Day of Action: World Says No to War on Yemen.

A total of 385 organizations from 28 countries signed the statement Action Corps circulated calling for the day of action, making this the largest anti-war coordination since the 2003 Iraq war protests. The day of action was a highlight in a multi-year grassroots movement to stop Western backing of the Saudi/UAE-led coalition in Yemen.

Four demands of 385 organizations from 28 countries:

1. Stop foreign aggression on Yemen.

2. Stop weapons and war support for Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

3. Lift the blockade on Yemen and open all land and seaports.

4. Restore and expand humanitarian aid for the people of Yemen.

As a result of years of grassroots organizing, advocacy, and mounting pressure that culminated in the day of action, the Biden administration has announced a number of significant decisions about Yemen. On the day of action, his administration announced they would lift some of the deadly sanctions against the Houthi rebels in Yemen.

Since then, he temporarily paused a number of arms sales to Saudi Arabia, cancelled two planned arms sales, reversed the Foreign Terrorist Organization designation of the Houthi rebels and, in his first major foreign policy speech as President, announced the U.S. would end support for “offensive operations” in Yemen.

While activists and Members of Congress have rightly demanded clarity about Biden’s policy in Yemen going forward, these announcements reflect years of mobilizing on the part of humanitarians, anti-war activists, constitutional conservatives, libertarians, and anti-imperialists. The President’s statements also represent a tremendous window of opportunity to actually end the war.

In his article, Yemen Can’t Wait: Why a Global Day of Action Has Created a Chance for Change, Chris Nineham explains that a number of factors have made the war unsustainable and unwinnable for Saudi Arabia.

These factors include the high financial cost of the war in the midst of an economic recession, loss of territory to the Houthi rebels, and an increasingly negative opinion of the war on the part of Americans, Brits and Europeans. At the end of January, Italy permanently blocked arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the UAE. A February 11 vote in the EU parliament called on all Member States “to halt the export of arms to all members of the Saudi-led coalition.”

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Featured image: Brendan Bell-Taylor, Action Corps Idaho organizer, and Laura Burton protest the war on Yemen in front of the Idaho State Capitol, in Boise, on January 25, 2021, as part of a Global Day of Action: World Says No to War on Yemen. Sen. Jim Risch, U.S. senator from Idaho, is the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. [Source: twitter.com]

All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

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The US-led anti-Chinese Quad alliance of itself, Australia, India, and Japan might be on the brink of collapse according to influential BJP ideologue Subramanian Swamy, who warned that Washington might expel New Delhi from this bloc if it goes through with its planned purchase of Russia’s S-400 air defense systems.

One of the most geopolitically consequential blocs of the 21^st century is unquestionably the Quad, a US-led anti-Chinese alliance that also includes Australia, India, and Japan. It presents one of the greatest strategic challenges to the emerging Multipolar World Order because of the potential that it has to offset China’s historic rise and therefore the new model of International Relations that it’s bringing to the forefront of global affairs. Many analysts have wondered what could possibly be done to stop the Quad, but most of them have since thrown up their hands in despair and seemingly accepted it as a fait accompli that they’re powerless to prevent. That strategic fatalism might have been a bit too premature, however, after influential BJP ideologue Subramanian Swamy’s public warning on Twitter on Thursday.

Russian publicly financed international media outlet Sputnik reported on his tweet, which read that “I notice none of my facts on Twitter have been proved wrong: 1. China has crossed LAC and occupied our territory. 2. Govt says disengagement has led to PLA withdrawal from Indian side of LAC is false 3. India buying S400 from Russia will lead to US expelling India from QUAD.” The reader should also be reminded that Swamy published a hateful anti-Russian article last October that elicited a very strong condemnation from the Russian Embassy in India at the time. India has the right to conduct its foreign affairs however it so chooses in line with what it describes as its “multi-alignment” strategy, but there should be little question in light of his recent statements that Swamy is seemingly pro-American with his outlook and at the very least unfriendly towards Russia.

This influential figure’s statements are at variance with what the Russian and Indian governments officially regard as their special and privileged strategic partnership that’s recently been experiencing a renaissance over the past few years, especially after Prime Minister Modi attended the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok in September 2019 as President Putin’s guest of honor. Despite some bumps in the road in the year and a half since, ties are back on the positive track following Foreign Secretary Shringla’s visit to Moscow last month. Quite clearly, Russian-Indian relations remain strong, which provides a much-needed element of certainty in the midst of what can be described as World War C, or the full-spectrum paradigm-changing processes catalyzed by the international community’s uncoordinated attempt to contain COVID-19.

The US’ repeated threats to sanction India for its planned S-400 purchase from Russia run the risk of complicating American-Indian relations, particularly when it comes to their hitherto close military cooperation in attempting to “contain” China through the Quad.

Nevertheless, Prime Minister Modi remains determined to go through with the deal, which speaks of how highly he regards Russia’s role in India’s “multi-alignment” “balancing” act no matter how imperfectly he’s thus far executed it. Swamy’s warning can therefore be interpreted as pressure upon the premier from within his own government, which shows that some influential forces don’t agree with Prime Minister Modi’s strategic direction. They’d do well to reconsider their views though since it’s arguably in all of Eurasia’s interests that India concludes the S-400 deal with Russia.

Swamy might actually be right for once, though much to the detriment of the American-aligned grand strategic vision that he seemingly sympathizes with. The US might not literally expel India from the Quad if it receives Russia’s S-400 air defense systems, but their anti-Chinese military coordination would certainly be adversely affected, especially if America imposes sanctions like it’s repeatedly threatened to do. That, however, would by default strengthen India’s ties with Russia and China, thus providing a much-needed impetus for reviving their trilateral cooperation through through RIC and thereby strengthening both BRICS and the SCO as well. This could in turn accelerate the rise of the Eurasian Century, especially as it was recently articulated by Pakistani officials during last week’s inaugural Islamabad Security Dialogue.

In connection with that, it also deserve mention that ties between India and Pakistan are gradually thawing as a result of recent developments between the two, particularly last month’s surprise ceasefire that continues to hold at the time of this analysis’ publication and earlier reports that the UAE is secretly trying to broker a more comprehensive solution to the UNSC-recognized disputed territory of Kashmir. The resultant reduction of American influence in India in the aftermath of Washington likely going through with its sanctions threats against New Delhi could potentially remove the greatest threat to peace in the region since the US wouldn’t be as powerful as before to divide and rule South Asia by exploiting this unresolved conflict.

In other words, India’s purchase of Russia’s S-400s would be in both of those countries’ interests as well as China’s and Pakistan’s when one considers the larger Eurasian strategic picture. The Quad probably won’t collapse, nor is it to be expected that the US would expel India from this alliance, but the group’s anti-Chinese military capabilities might take a strong hit as New Delhi would be less prone to closely cooperate with Washington in this respect if it becomes victimized by American sanctions for its sovereign decision to go through with its Russian air defense deal. With these interconnected dynamics in mind, observers can therefore rightly describe the S-400 deal as potentially being a grand strategic game-changer provided that India retains the political will to go through with it despite Swamy’s and other influential forces’ efforts to stop it.

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This article was originally published on OneWorld.

Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

“Biden was a man who believed in regime change. Biden was a man who believed Saddam Hussein was the personification of evil. Biden was a man who believed that we had to use whatever means necessary up to and including war to remove Saddam Hussein from power. And Joe Biden recognized that weapons inspections, if allowed to proceed would undermine his effort. This is why he had to discredit the inspections.” – Former Chief UN Weapons inspector Scott Ritter (included in interview.)

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Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in December of 1991 the U.S., NATO and the world had entered a brand new era. With the threat of the Soviets launching an invasion of the European Union now essentially moot, it would seem the hostile military alliance had lost its usefulness. [1]

But in 1999, the U.S. led cavalry found a new lease on life! Negotiations between the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and the Kosovo Liberation Army fighting for an independent ethnic Albanian state broke down. After the pivotal  Račak massacre in January of 1999, NATO took the role of instituting a military ‘peacekeeping force’ to restrain both sides. When talks at the Château de Rambouillet, outside Paris failed to arrive at an agreement, international monitors withdrew and then the KLA with the air support from NATO launched the beginning of a 78 day war. [2][3]

NATO then went to war on Afghanistan two years later on the excuse they were defending themselves from terrorism which they never proved emerged from that country. [4][5]

Two years after that, the U.S. and the UK, together with a small list of belligerents attacked the beleaguered country of Iraq, on the principle assertion this country decimated by the first war in 1991 and years of devastating sanctions, posed a threat to America and the world by virtue of his devastating supply of ‘weapons of mass destruction.’ Of course, the UN weapons inspectors dedicated to finding and destroying his entire supply of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons could not verify their existence any longer. But with Colin Powell’s famous presentation providing the proper pretext, the world stood a month later and watched in horror as the Coalition of the Willing subjected the former Mesopotamia to a truly Shock and Awe Spectacle.

The war killed at least 100,000 civilians. The leader Saddam Hussein was executed. The war lasted until December of 2011. And absolutely no weapons of mass destruction were found!

The War on Yugoslavia launched on March 24, 1999. The War in Iraq launched March 19, 2003.

Once again, in chapter 3 of our series on wars launched in March, the Global Research News Hour looks at these two principal conflicts which would reshape the wartime trajectory the U.S. would pursue at a time when threats from Russia were reduced.

Our first half hour features a few comments made by guests of a past show speaking of the background of the War on Yugoslavia. A brief summary of their comments are supplied in a 20 minute period. They include Professor Michel Chossudovsky, Živadin Jovanović, James Bissett and Scott Taylor.

In our second half hour, we are delighted to have former UN Weapons Inspector Scott Ritter on to recount his insights into the falseness of the pretext of weapons of mass destruction, his understanding of the real motive of the war, his take on the former Senator Joe Biden who sounded like a hawk 23 years ago (see video below), and his take on the timing of wars almost always in March.

d

Professor Michel Chossudovsky is an award-winning author, Professor of Economics (emeritus) at the University of Ottawa, Founder and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), Montreal, Editor of Global Research. In May of 1999 he published the in depth analysis of the conflict in Yugoslavia in the article NATO’s War of Aggression against Yugoslavia: Who are the War Criminals? For these and related writings he received the 2014 Gold Medal for Merit of the Republic of Serbia.

Živadin Jovanović served as the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia between 1998 and 2000. Since 2005, he has served as President of the Belgrade Forum for a World of Equals, a non-profit organization which is a member of the World Peace Council. The Forum supports world peace and non-interventionism and opposes “humanitarian wars”.

James Bissett is a Canadian diplomat with a 36 year track record of public service in the Departments of Citizenship and Immigration and Foreign Affairs. He was Canada’s ambassador to Yugoslavia from 1990 until 1992, with responsibility for Albania and Bulgaria. A consistent critic of the West’s policies in the former Yugoslavia, Bissett testified at the Trial of Slobodan Milošević as a defence witness.

Scott Taylor is a former soldier, a journalist, and the Publisher/Editor of the Canadian military magazine Esprit de Corps. Taylor reported from the ground during and after NATO’s 1999 assault on the former Yugoslavia. He is the author of several books including Diary of an Uncivil War: The Violent Aftermath of the Kosovo Conflict (2002).

Scott Ritter is a U.S. Marine Corps Intelligence officer, former UN Chief Weapons Inspector from 1991 -1998, and is currently engaged as a commentator and columnist on Huffington Post, RT OP-ED, and the American Conservative.

(Global Research News Hour Episode 310)

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Notes:

1. https://intpolicydigest.org/the-end-of-nato/
2. Peter Beaumont and Patrick Wintour (July 18, 1999) ‘Kosovo: the untold story’, The Guardian; https://www.theguardian.com/world/1999/jul/18/warcrimes.balkans
3. Timothy W. Crawford (April 1, 2001) ‘Pivotal Deterrence and the Kosovo War: Why the Holbrooke Agreement Failed’, Brookings; https://www.brookings.edu/articles/pivotal-deterrence-and-the-kosovo-war-why-the-holbrooke-agreement-failed/
4. https://www.nato.int/docu/update/2001/1001/e1002a.htm
5. https://www.globalresearch.ca/was-america-attacked-by-afghanistan-on-september-11-2001/5307151

“Fraudulent Marketing”: The Pfizer COVID-19 Vaccine Is an “Unapproved Product” which Is “Permitted for Use”

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, March 26 2021

Should we trust Big Pharma Companies which have a criminal record? In a historic US Department of Justice decision in September 2009, Pfizer Inc. pleaded guilty to criminal charges. It was “The Largest Health Care Fraud Settlement in Its History”

Welcome to the “COVID Testing Industrial Complex”, Which Is Fast Becoming a $100 Billion a Year Industry

By Jordan Schachtel, March 26 2021

The COVID-19 Testing Industrial Complex in the United States is completely out of control, and the American taxpayer has been drafted into churning out hundreds of millions of dollars per day to keep it afloat.

Scientist to FDA: You Are Ignoring ‘Clear and Present Danger’ Associated with COVID Vaccine

By Dr. Hooman Noorchashm and Children’s Health Defense, March 26 2021

In an email to FDA officials, Pfizer executives and media, Dr. Hooman Noorchashm warns many more will die needlessly from COVID vaccines “if we carelessly and indiscriminately” vaccinate people already infected with the virus.

AstraZeneca Vaccine Correlated to Blood Clots, Death. Norwegian Physician Pål Andre Holme

By Line Fausko, Martha CS Holmes, and Oda Ording, March 26 2021

The experts who have examined the three hospitalized health workers believe that the AstraZeneca vaccine triggered a strong immune response. One of the health workers died. The cause of our patients’ condition has now been found, says chief physician and professor Pål Andre Holme.

Elephants in Africa Face Grave Extinction Threat, New Expert Assessment Finds

By Center For Biological Diversity, March 26 2021

In a long-awaited move, the International Union for Conservation of Nature announced today that elephants in Africa face a serious risk of extinction. At the same time, it is officially identifying African elephants as two distinct species: savanna elephants and forest elephants.

Video: The Conflict in North Syria: US Continues to Smuggle Oil, While Turkey Complains to Russia It Can’t

By South Front, March 25 2021

The intensity of the conflict in Syria’s northeast refuses to die down, as more and more strikes are carried out targeting each involved party’s interests. For its part, MSM reports on all of these, but many of them are presented in a light, much different from reality.

“Two Fatal Errors in its Assessment of the SARS-CoV-2 Pandemic”. What SAGE Has Got Wrong

By Dr. Mike Yeadon, March 26 2021

Dr Mike Yeadon has a degree in biochemistry and toxicology and a research-based PhD in respiratory pharmacology. He has spent over 30 years leading new medicines research in some of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, leaving Pfizer in 2011 as Vice President & Chief Scientist for Allergy & Respiratory.

UK’s Baroness Caroline Cox Slams the “Undeclared Economic War” on Syria

By Baroness Caroline Cox, March 26 2021

Over nine million Syrians are food insecure at the moment, and an estimated nine out of 10 live below the poverty line.

Why Scottish Independence Could be Main Obstacle to ‘Global Britain’

By Johanna Ross, March 26 2021

It was announced on Wednesday that government buildings across the UK would now be required to fly the UK flag at all times. This of course won’t go down too well in Scotland, where the Union Jack is, for many, an offensive reminder of London control.

The “Corona Crisis” and the War of “The Super-Rich” against the Earth’s Citizens

By Emanuel Pastreich, March 26 2021

Corporations, multinational investment banks, and the super-rich that hide behind them have launched the final stage this year of a ruthless war of a tiny few against the great majority of humanity.

All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

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Corporations, multinational investment banks, and the super-rich that hide behind them have launched the final stage this year of a ruthless war of a tiny few against the great majority of humanity.

Although they pay off their puppets in the media to float happy tales of some happy resolution to the dire situation of the moment, they already know that the die is cast, that they are committed to a strategy of distracting, seeding division, undermining rational thinking and using a combination of blatant intimidation with open bribery to slowly, systematically, overpower and reduce to slavery 99.98% of the Earth’s population.

They know already, according to the calculations of their supercomputers, what will happen if they are not successful in this plan. They also know that catastrophic climate change and biodiversity loss will make it impossible for them to monopolize the wealth and the resources for long.

There is literally no limit to how far they will go.

The tools they use to pursue this war against the citizens of the Earth are technology, propaganda and disinformation campaigns, threats against individuals who display leadership skills and massive bribes for the leaders who are allowed to be covered in the media to represent the conservative and the progressive causes.

They also employ as part of this strategy an intimate knowledge of certain key weaknesses in the brain, and the potential for exploiting the human inclination to determine truth based on a vague sense of the mood of the herd, rather than logic. That is to say they are investing billions in hidden money to systematically create social pressure that makes citizens conform with pointless mandates for masks or vaccines that are launched from diverse platforms as a means of inducing the population to police itself.

Without such a strategy, the super-rich could not possibly seize control of the entire Earth.

There has been extensive research by corporations, and by the CIA and Department of Defense (government organizations exploited to hide the true entities demanding such research) into how humans can be manipulated without their knowledge, and compelled through imperceptible persuasion to permit, or even aid, their own disenfranchisement without us even being aware of this silent and invisible takeover.

Such operations have been undertaken before, but never on this global scale. New developments in super-computing and the global integration of, and deregulation of, finance, has made such a master plan possible for the first time.

Recent developments are best viewed as the final acceleration of a process by which corporations bribed and lobbied all authority figures in government and academics to go along with a process of privatization, commercialization, and automation that now means that a tiny handful of people can control every aspect of human experience in an absolute sense while the vast majority of citizens cannot even conceive of what is taking place. We have not reached that state yet, but Elon Musk, Bill Gates and others believe, based on the calculations of supercomputers, that it is now possible.

The super-rich has also invested wisely in the establishment of a panoply of sham activists, or toothless, “feel good, do nothing” NGOs.

These “movements” are allowed to appear in the corporate-controlled media, and they pretend to respond to corporate power, but they purposely discourage citizens from organizing themselves (they ask only for donations, or attendance at protests, but they pointedly do not empower people to form their own groups or achieve financial and ideological independence).

Such NGOs are silent about the mass manipulation of the media and of politics by global finance—even though that is the primary cause of the political problems we face.

If we follow the current trajectory, there will not be a single part of our lives that is completely controlled by a multinational corporation in the next few years.

We do not have that long to act.

Image on the right is from Natural News

The push for mandatory COVID-19 “vaccines” in the face of the overwhelming scientific evidence against them is not a matter of mistaken science or bad policy. It is rather a process of preparing government officials, doctors, reporters, and other media figures to follow orders from above that have no rational basis.

After this “softening-up process,” which is carefully calibrated on the basis of secret CIA torture programs designed to test the weaknesses of the human psyche, a rougher and more brutal form of the rule can be implemented.

The mask mandate was the first step in the implementation of this form of massive psychological warfare. It is, to use the technical term, a slow “rape of the mind.”

The enormous restructuring of governance and the economy described by the World Economic Forum as the “Great Reset” is not a secret and anyone who takes the time to read that book, and related documents, can figure out about 70% of what is their agenda is.

The citizen will be convinced that he or she operates within a functional country and that there is some process by which the politicians at the top take actions on their behalf. But the super-rich cares nothing for nation-states and their populations and they use politicians to deflect attention away from themselves. Every time a politician takes a fall, it is to distract you from the predations of the rich. Every attack on minorities is a trick to get you hooked on race and diversity and distracted from the concentration of wealth.

We are increasingly subject to the whims of unaccountable global powers, and the intentionally render us passive, open to persuasion, and therefore incapable of resistance, by the media that is controlled by those powers.

The super-rich relies on two approaches to psychological manipulation that go back to the 1930s and before but have been perfected by recent research.

The first technique is the use of traumatic events that are reported on in a sensationalist and unscientific manner in the media so as to induce a deep sense of shock, disorientation and confusion in the population as a whole. The mental trauma of such events, whether the 9.11 incident, or the hyped-up COVID-19 crisis, or the “armed insurrection” at the Capitol, is used to induce passivity and receptivity to profound institutional shifts that would otherwise be impossible.

Naomi Klein describes this approach as the “shock doctrine” and although she hesitates to delve too deeply into the degree to which it has become national policy, she accurately traces the approach back to the torture programs designed to test the limits of the human psyche.

Such trauma affects the reactive and emotional part of the human brain known as the amygdala, bringing on a “fight or flight” response in the psyche that overrides the rational, integrative, response to external events that would be carried out by the prefrontal cortex in normal conditions.

Because we as individuals, and as populations, are unaware of how the amygdala has taken over decision making from the prefrontal cortex because of these engineered shocks, we are unable to organize, or even conceive of, a response to the real threat. Instead, we focus on the cooked-up threats offered to us by the commercial media like Islamic terrorism in the case of 9.11 or the spread of a dangerous virus in the case of the COVID-19 operation.

The second strategy is to induce a hypnotic state in the brain of the individual, and the population as a whole, through the constant repetition of certain themes and images through advertisements, commercials, images, and themes articulated in movies, TV shows, reporting, and even the packaging of products.

The stimulation alternates between the intentionally boring and distracting images and direct appeals to the pleasure centers of the brain such as the desire for food, for sexual arousal, or for pleasant experiences.

The advertisements promoting the enjoyment of food and encouraging low-level sexual arousal are not only, or even primarily, aimed at selling products. They are intended to induce a state of passivity in the population.

The CIA explains the process,

“Hypnosis is basically a technique which permits acquisition of direct access to the sensory motor cortex and pleasure centers, and lower cerebral (emotional) portions of the right side of the brain following successful disengagement of the stimulus screening function of the left hemisphere of the brain. The right hemisphere which functions as the noncritical, holistic, nonverbal and pattern-oriented component of the brain, appears to accept what the left hemisphere passes to it without question. Consequently, if the left hemisphere can be distracted either through boredom or through reduction to a soporific, semi-sleep state, external stimuli to include hypnotic suggestions are allowed to pass unchallenged into the right hemisphere where they are accepted and acted on directly.”

(FOIA document “Analysis and Assessment of Gateway Process” June 9, 1983 (US Army Intelligence and Security Command)

CIA-RDP96-00788R001700210016-5

The scale of this experiment in mass hypnosis to render the citizens of all the world passive, and unable to resist persuasion from authority figures is unprecedented. This process is being undertaken slowly, over months and years, following complex algorithms that are kept secret.

It is critical in this process that individuals be isolated from each other, unable to communicate except through mediums controlled by multinational corporations, and that they be offered only ineffective and superficial organizations to join organizations in which they will be incapable of participating in the decision-making process, or of effecting change. Quarantine, lockdowns, social distancing, and the promotion of a narcissistic consumption culture are critical to that process.

The result is that the citizens of the United States, and around the world, are being reduced to consumers of products supplied by multinational corporations who cannot even conceive of how the world has been radically transformed in this great reset.

They are being rendered passive and unresponsive so that the super-rich can quickly seize complete control of the systems by which countries are governed, by which money and finance are determined, the media by which information is distributed, the universities and research institutes by which authoritative perspectives backed by science are presented, the farms and distribution systems by which food is provided, the aquafers and irritation systems by which water is provided, and every other aspect of human experience.

When we awake from this slumber, if we ever do, we will discover that every aspect of our lives is controlled by unaccountable powers which we cannot understand, which we have no way to challenge and which will increase slowly and systematically the means by which we are made slaves, and, if necessary, destroyed.

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Emanuel Pastreich served as the president of the Asia Institute, a think tank with offices in Washington DC, Seoul, Tokyo and Hanoi. Pastreich also serves as director general of the Institute for Future Urban Environments. Pastreich declared his candidacy for president of the United States as an independent in February, 2020

All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

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This article was first published in December 2020.

The COVID-19 Testing Industrial Complex in the United States is completely out of control, and the American taxpayer has been drafted into churning out hundreds of millions of dollars per day to keep it afloat. This continually growing behemoth, which was spawned in 2020 because of the urgent insistence of select, powerful members of the U.S. “public health expert” class, has no intention of exiting the stage quietly. Individuals and healthcare-related corporations are getting filthy rich off of this broken, corrupt industry, which largely produces junk tests, and has contributed to an out of control, ongoing “casedemic” in the United States.

Despite the fact that this industry has failed to do anything positive for “public health” related to the coronavirus epidemic, some in the industry are even devising plans to put a COVID testing kit in every home in America. The COVID-19 Testing Industrial Complex has produced a shockingly high revenue stream over the course of a year.

How to Test Every American for COVID-19, Every Day – The Atlantic https://t.co/wWgVZyG5Ud

— Andy Slavitt 🇺🇸💉 (@ASlavitt) August 17, 2020

To get a sense of all of the costs involved, I researched the average COVID-19 testing costs at some of the biggest labs and testing manufacturers in the U.S. The FDA has now cleared well over 100 entities (and even a dozen China-based companies) with Emergency Use Authorizations (EUAs) that allow for these companies to deploy tests in the United States. Here’s the breakdown:

The cost of COVID-19 tests range anywhere from $20-$850. The median cost of a COVID-19 test is around $129 per test. And that’s just the cost of the test itself. This price range does not include the additional costs — including, at a bare minimum for most, the costs of specimen collection and a doctor’s visit — to the insurance provider, federal, state and local governments (which has the taxpayer foot the bill for people who can’t afford a test), and/or the patient.

The United States COVID-19 Testing Industrial Complex now churns out around two million COVID-19 tests per day. That puts the current median cost for COVID testing in America (not including the additional costs) at approximately $254 million dollars per day, $7.6 billion per month, and $91.4 billion per year. To put that in context, That’s more annual cash than the revenue generated by U.S. corporate behemoths such as Boeing, Intel, FedEx, Facebook, and Target.

As for the profits being generated by the COVID testing industry, we can get an accurate count on that number by discovering the financial filings of major testing labs. Quest, the U.S. testing giant that handles about 20% of all COVID tests across the United States, estimates it takes in $42 in revenue per test, with the average processing coming in at $29. That would come out to $26 million in profits per day, $780 million per month, and $9.3 billion in pure profits per year. And that’s only for the lab side of the equation. Remember, getting a COVID-19 test involves several other elements, such as the aforementioned physician’s visit and specimen collection costs, which significantly increases the revenue stream for the entire COVID testing industry.

COVID testing is most rampant in the United States, but it is very much a global industry. Worldometers.com has tracked around 1.1 billion total COVID-19 tests. Calculated with the U.S. cost average, the global COVID testing industry has cost over $141 billion thus far.

Many have summarized that the ongoing vaccine deployment efforts will act to shutter the COVID Testing Industrial Complex, but it’s important to remember a few things about the current state of testing in America.

First and foremost, Our COVID-19 testing accuracy problem has not been solved. Governments on all levels in the United States have not cleaned up our inaccurate testing regime.

People who get the vaccine — putting aside whether it works or not — will very likely still test positive for the coronavirus in large numbers. The vaccine trials had very strict standards for diagnosing positive cases. The trials required both a positive test and recognizable symptoms for someone to be labeled COVID-19 positive.

In the clinical trials, Big Pharma outfits used a much lower cycle threshold (read about the cycle threshold problem at Rational Ground) than the average COVID-19 test in order to get a more accurate diagnosis.

On the other side of the table, Our FDA-authorized testing regime includes mostly junk tests (their cycle thresholds are too high, generating a massive amount of false positives, leading to our national “casedemic”) and diagnoses asymptomatic people as COVID-19 positive. The vaccine trials and our current testing reality are worlds apart. This problem will almost certainly emerge in the coming days and weeks, and it’s going to cause lots of confusion in the public. Who knows if the “public health experts” who are so inclined to promote testing will weaponize this problem to demand even more testing and more restrictions, to keep you safe and COVID-free, of course…

Here's everything you need you know about PCR tests and the wrong-headed strategy of testing people who are asymptomatic .https://t.co/7ezuYzNReE

— RationalGround.com (@Rational_Ground) September 13, 2020

Now approaching $100 billion in annual costs directly associated with it, the COVID Testing Industrial Complex is becoming too big to fail, and it’s long past time for legislators across the nation to rein it in before this broken, corrupt industry becomes a permanent fixture in America.

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Featured image is from The Dossier

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Below is the report of EuroNews confirming Denmark’s Decision to Suspend the Astrazeneka Vaccine.

The Danish Health and Medicines Authority said they were still assessing the use of the jab in its vaccination programme.  

Earlier this month, Denmark and several other EU member states halted the rollout of AstraZeneca vaccines after reports of several serious cases of blood clots.

All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

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In an email to FDA officials, Pfizer executives and media, Dr. Hooman Noorchashm warns many more will die needlessly from COVID vaccines “if we carelessly and indiscriminately” vaccinate people already infected with the virus.

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From CHD’s editor: Following the March 19 death of 32-year-old Benjamin G. Goodman after receiving the Johnson & Johnson COVID vaccine, Dr. Hooman Noorchashm wrote the email below. In it, Noorchashm warns of the “clear and present danger” posed by administering COVID vaccines to people already infected with the virus. 

The email is addressed to Dr. Janet Woodcock, acting commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), but Noorchashm copied others, including the FDA’s Peter Marks, several Pfizer executives, reporters at CBS News, Fox News and The New York Times, and other scientists and colleagues.

This is not the first time Noorchashm has written to the FDA recommending that people be screened for COVID before being vaccinated — in fact, it’s the third. He has yet to receive a response.

Here’s the text of Dr. Noorchashm’s email

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Dear Dr. Woodcock,

Here I am writing to report to you the death of Mr. Benjamin G. Goodman of NY within a day following vaccination with the J&J COVID-19 vaccine.

This is his obituary. He was 32 and otherwise healthy:

Attached, you may read his mother’s Facebook posting about his death.

Dr. Woodcock, it is untenable for you and your colleagues to be ignoring these deaths and vaccine complications without lifting a finger to do anything — simply this: These complications are mounting and CDC and FDA’s surveillance systems are missing the signal — the signal is deafening on social media!

And these are NOT Russian bots infiltrating our SM platforms, these are Americans being harmed and ignored … by YOU and our public health system.

As an immunologist, I know that these vaccines are some of the most powerful and effective we’ve ever made. I know them, I understand them and I know that we need them to achieve herd immunity.

But, as I’ve told you before, we are deploying this defensive weapon wildly indiscriminately in the midst of a pandemic outbreak, while many are “the recently infected.” It is my professional opinion as an immunologist and physician that this indiscriminate vaccination is a clear and present danger to a subset of the already infected.

I know fully well that it is highly likely that many more lives will be saved from these vaccines than harmed by them in this pandemic. But THAT is no justification for relinquishing your duty as a chief public health officer in the U.S. to guard and defend the safety of this minority subset in harm’s way from indiscriminate vaccination.

So now you have a few names … “Anecdotes,” our colleagues call them … “N’s of 1,” know only too well … J. Barton Williams, Kassidi Lyn Kurill, Benjamin G. Goodman, Marvin Hagler, Hank Aaron, Larry King … there will be many more, at the rate we are going.

But the press and all your colleagues in public health are inclined to see these as “unrelated” to our savior vaccines.

I write here, knowing that efficacy and safety are two distinct and equally critical parameters in medical care — and knowing that you all are sacrificing the latter to the former.

But you cannot go on like this — you must see Benjamin Goodman, J. Barton Williams, Kassidi Lyn Kurill, Marvin Hagler, Hank Aaron, Larry King …

There will be many more in the coming months as we carelessly and indiscriminately vaccinate the already infected, millions a day … It is a near certainty.

Hooman Noorchashm M.D., Ph.D.

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Hooman Noorchashm MD, Ph.D. is a physician-scientist. He is an advocate for ethics, patient safety and women’s health.

Featured image is from Children’s Health Defense

All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

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Below is the Google Translation of the original article in Norwegian. (There are some minor errors in translation). 

The original in Norwegian  (VG.no) (See also Broadcast in Norwegian)

Professor on suspected vaccine side effects: – The cause has been found

The experts who have examined the three hospitalized health workers believe that the AstraZeneca vaccine triggered a strong immune response. One of the health workers died.

The cause of our patients’ condition has now been found, says chief physician and professor Pål Andre Holme to VG.

A group at Rikshospitalet, led by Holme, has worked hard to find out why three health workers under the age of 50 were admitted with severe blood clots after taking the AstraZeneca vaccine.

The experts have worked on the basis of a hypothesis that the vaccines triggered an unexpected immune reaction in the sick health workers, who have triggered the system so that a combination of blood clots and low platelets has been obtained.

It is this theory that they now believe they have confirmed.

Our theory that this is a strong immune response that most likely comes after the vaccine, [which] has been found. In collaboration with the section for advanced platelet immunology at UNN, we have now detected specific antibodies against platelets that can give such an image, which we know from other parts of medicine, but then with drugs as the triggering cause, the superior [physician ]explains.

You say most likely?

We have the reason. And there is no other thing than the vaccine that can explain that we have received that immune response, says Holme.

Why is it nothing more than the vaccine?

Around 120,000 Norwegians have so far been vaccinated with AstraZeneca. Thus, very few cases of suspected serious side effects have been reported among the total number of vaccinated. Norway has temporarily paused vaccination, read more further down in the case.

This is how a blood clot occurs. Specific antibodies.  Holme emphasizes that it is not antibodies in the blood in general that are the problem. We are talking about very specific antibodies.

What has happened in the body from the time they took the vaccine until FOUND THE CAUSE?

We take the vaccine to get an immune response to what we are to be protected against. Then you get, among other things, the development of antibodies. Some antibodies can then react so that they can activate the platelets, as in these cases, and cause a blood clot. And because we have these antibodies on the surface, they are removed from the circulation, thus they get too low platelets, says Holme. A very rare condition.

On Sunday, one of the three health workers who were admitted to Rikshospitalet died. They have all been treated for a very rare condition.

They came in with acute pain They had blood clots in unusual places, such as the stomach and brain. In addition, they had bleeding and low platelet counts

We will soon decide the way forward. Large parts of Europe, including Norway, have in the last week put the AstraZeneca vaccination on pause.

After Norway and Denmark reported the suspected serious side effects, other countries have reviewed their own data to look for similar cases.

Steinar Madsen at the Norwegian Medicines Agency says they have been informed that the Rikshospitalet event has meant that there is talk of a strong immune response – but he says he can not comment on details now.

The Adverse Reaction Committee of the European Medicines Agency (EMA), where Norway also sits, has a meeting on Thursday about the case and is expected to issue a statement.

This will to a large extent also be taken into account when assessing this on a European basis, that Norway has made such a solid effort to find out about this here, says Madsen.

Once the EMA has issued a statement, it is up to national authorities to decide the way forward for their respective countries.

VG [Norwegian News Agency] has been in contact with AstraZeneca, which does not wish to comment on the matter at this time but will await the EMA’s decision.

Translated by United for Truth  (our thanks to United for Truth)

Original source VG.no

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First published on March 6, 2021

Should we trust Big Pharma Companies which have a criminal record?

In a historic US Department of Justice decision in September 2009, Pfizer Inc. pleaded guilty to criminal charges. It was “The Largest Health Care Fraud Settlement in Its History”

Pharmacia [Pfizer] & Upjohn Company has agreed to plead guilty to a felony violation of the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act ….

See below for details.

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Pfizer Inc, is currently involved in marketing its experimental mRNA vaccine with the relentless support of national governments.  Amply documented, barely reported by the media, numerous cases of  deaths and injury have occurred.

What is at stake is what you might call “C. Y. A.” namely,

“the bureaucratic technique of averting future accusations of policy error or wrongdoing by deflecting responsibility in advance” (William Safire, NYT,)

Extensive fraud and coverup prevail at the highest levels of government.

The “Green Light” to market the experimental mRNA vaccine was granted back in December 2020, despite the fact that according to the FDA, the vaccine is an “unapproved product”.

The FDA in its ambiguous statement has provided a so-called Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) to the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, namely “to permit the emergency use of the unapproved product, … for active immunization…” (see below)

Pfizer “Largest Health Care Fraud” 2009

Déjà Vu: Flash Forward to 2020-2021

How on earth could you trust a Big Pharma vaccine conglomerate which pleaded guilty to criminal charges by the US Department of Justice including “fraudulent marketing” and “felony violation of the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act”?

The 2020-2021 mRNA vaccine violations far surpass the health care fraud committed by Pfizer Inc in 2009.

“Fraudulent marketing” is an understatement: The mRNA vaccine announced by Pfizer, Moderna Inc, Johnson and Johnson and Astrazeneka  is based on an experimental gene editing mRNA technology which has a bearing on the human genome.  The standard animal lab tests using mice or ferrets were not conducted.  Pfizer “went straight to human “guinea pigs.”

Human tests began in late July and early August 2020. “Three months is unheard of for testing a new vaccine. Several years is the norm.”

Our thanks to Large and JIPÉM

This caricature by Large + JIPÉM  explains our predicament:

Mouse No 1: “Are You Going to get Vaccinated”,

Mouse No. 2: Are You Crazy, They Haven’t finished the Tests on Humans”

“The plan to develop a vaccine is profit driven. It is supported by corrupt governments serving the interests of Big Pharma. The US government had already ordered 100 million doses back in July and the EU is to purchase 300 million doses. It’s Big Money for Big Pharma, generous payoffs to corrupt politicians, at the expense of tax payers.”

See Michel Chossudovsky, The 2020 Worldwide Corona Crisis: Destroying Civil Society, Engineered Economic Depression, Global Coup d’État and the “Great Reset” E-Book, February 26, 2021

So-called “emergency use” has been granted to Pfizer with a view to promoting a pharmaceutical product which is “experimental”, “unapproved” by the FDA and outright dangerous.

Legal Definitions are Turned Upside Down: The Transition from “Unapproved” to “Approved” 

• “unapproved” by the FDA,
• “permitted” (under emergency use) by the FDA
• and then “approved” by the US government’s health authorities
• resulting in numerous deaths and injuries.

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Last week the UK’s new Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development, and Foreign Policy was published, outlining the country’s future geopolitical strategy. The 114 page document, which I discuss in a previous article, conveys a clear message: the days of Britain taking a backseat in international affairs is over. (This translates as more meddling in the affairs of other states of course – soft power manipulation, supporting regime change etc). Britain is back, so get out your Union Jack flags and remember the lyrics to ‘Rule Britannia’.

Incidentally, it was announced on Wednesday that government buildings across the UK would now be required to fly the UK flag at all times. This of course won’t go down too well in Scotland, where the Union Jack is, for many, an offensive reminder of London control. Indeed, the SNP’s Mhairi Black said: “If the Tories think an overload of Union Jacks on buildings is the answer to promote the strength of the Union, then it shows how thin the case for the Union is.”

However, the idea of promoting the British flag very much ties with Boris Johnson’s nationalist crusade, to celebrate ‘Britishness’ and regain some national pride which he has indicated in the past we are lacking in.

Ironically however Boris Johnson himself has been integral in the current divide between north and south. An unpopular figure in Scotland, his leadership has only boosted the case for Scottish independence, along with Brexit, of which he was a key proponent. Scotland has maintained its opposition to Brexit (it voted against it) and has stated that in an independent Scotland it would seek to rejoin the EU. The SNP have criticized the way the Scottish government was not properly consulted during Brexit negotiations. This apparent disregard for Scottish concerns on the matter have rubbed salt in the wound of a nation already disgruntled by being forced out of the EU against its will.

Scotland has never been closer to independence. Public opinions polls consistently show a majority in favour of dismantling the Union. And given Boris Johnson’s plans for ‘Global Britain’ this could be a real stumbling block, for two main reasons. For Scotland’s foreign policy would likely be – based on both SNP policy documents and think-tank publications – non-interventionist, involving a significant reduction in military expenditure.

Take for example, this document written by two Scottish academics and published by Scottish think-tank ‘Common Weal’. It clearly states ‘Scotland would be an international actor of a fundamentally different character from the UK.’  It says that an independent Scotland would reject the traditional British approach of ‘projecting power’, as historically it has ‘invited international criticism due to the damage that has sometimes been visited upon the “recipients” of this projected power’.

Furthermore it is suggested that the country’s ‘“military behaviour” would be guided by specific, dedicated articles within a written constitution… this would also give Scottish governments recourse to constitutional protection against taking action in instances where they were solicited by other international actors to ‘get involved’ in military operations which might be of questionable morality, or which might be considered against Scotland’s national interests.’

Such an approach of legal framework would contrast greatly with current UK legislation, as we have seen in recent years with regime change operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and missile strikes on Syria – all which have been carried out against the will of much of the population, particularly north of the border.

The second area in which an independent Scotland would cause problems for the UK’s ‘power projection’ plans is also outlined in the “Common Weal” paper: nuclear weapons. The document clearly states that Scotland would be free of them, something which would cause England some problems in terms of where to store them all. It is believed there are around 200 nuclear weapons based at Coulport in Scotland; it would be tricky getting them all down to Devonport, 170 miles away, and it’s been suggested there isn’t enough storage space there anyway. Removal of these nuclear weapons has been described as a ‘bedrock’ policy of the SNP, who recently accused the UK government of hypocrisy by signing up to the non-proliferation treaty but increasing its nuclear stockpile at the same time.

It’s worth pointing out that the SNP have also traditionally been opposed to NATO membership, changing their policy only in 2012 under the condition that the military block would give up its nuclear weapons – not likely to happen anytime soon. Therefore any hope London has of working together with Scotland in the area of defence is compromised by i) Scotland not becoming a NATO member and ii) it abandoning its nuclear capability.

Geographically too, Scotland has been important for UK defence. Firstly in terms of being an experimental playground for biological weapons; such as the anthrax testing on Gruinard island and for honing missile defence systems – the Ministry of Defence uses 115,000 square kilometres of airspace in the Hebrides, and Cape Wrath is the only naval firing range in Britain. Also strategically its location has been said to be vital in defending Britain from the so-called ‘Russian threat’ we hear much about nowadays.

An Economist article last year outlined this in detail, stating that Scotland’s ‘northerly latitude is ideal for projecting air and naval power into key Atlantic sea lanes and bastions of Russian power in the High North’. It also explains how typhoons can be launched from RAF Lossiemouth in Moray to ‘Russian bombers from Murmansk that approach British airspace’.  As I have stated in previous articles, the Russian threat is a complete misreading of Russian foreign policy objectives, but it can be used by British leadership to justify military expenditure.

Given Boris Johnson’s plans that were obviously long in the pipeline for ‘Global Britain’ it shows remarkable lack of foresight that no real attempts have been made by the UK government to reach out to Scots. There has been a mad rush recently to move civil servants up to Glasgow, and a concerted media effort to undermine the Scottish government and the First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, but it’s all a bit late.

Scots have, by now, been persuaded that the Westminster government, over its handling of Brexit, has no real regard for Scotland and its wishes. And a combination of arrogance and genuine disregard for Scotland has led Johnson’s government to adopting a laissez-faire approach. The result: the independence train has already left the station and there’s no catching up with it. As such, Boris Johnson would be better advised to rethink his foreign policy strategy, as if Scotland has anything to do with it, there won’t be any ‘Global Britain’ left to project.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Johanna Ross is a journalist based in Edinburgh, Scotland. You can follow the author on Twitter.

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In a long-awaited move, the International Union for Conservation of Nature announced today that elephants in Africa face a serious risk of extinction. At the same time, it is officially identifying African elephants as two distinct species: savanna elephants and forest elephants.

The reclassification — part of an update to IUCN’s Red List of Threatened Species — could boost recognition of the dire plight of forest elephants. Forest elephant populations were found to have declined by more than 80% in the last 93 years. Savanna elephant populations declined by more than 50% over the last 75 years.

Both forest and savanna elephants are threatened by ivory poaching and habitat loss and encroachment.

“Forest elephants are finally getting the recognition they deserve, but now we have to crack down on the poaching of these desperately imperiled animals,” said Tanya Sanerib, international legal director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “Acknowledging forest elephants as a unique species is just the first step.”

Today’s IUCN update deemed forest elephants to be critically endangered because of steep declines caused by poaching and habitat destruction. But IUCN also downgraded the status of the more prevalent savanna elephants from vulnerable to endangered.

“This is a signal to the United States and the international community that major resources must be put into curbing ivory poaching and trafficking, closing remaining domestic ivory markets, and saving these marvelous, irreplaceable engineers of the forest and savanna from extinction,” said Sanerib.

Even if poaching were halted today, forest elephants will take decades to recover because of their slow reproductive rates. Both assessments highlighted that illegally trafficked ivory has increased “substantially” since 2006, according to seizure data.

Savanna elephants (Loxodonta africana) have larger frames and ears and curving ivory tusks and are found in southern, eastern and central Africa. Forest elephants (Loxodonta cyclotis) have slightly smaller builds and ears and thinner, straighter ivory and are found in western and central Africa.

IUCN simultaneously released new assessments for 6,472 other species around the globe, and nearly a third of those species were deemed threatened with extinction. Among the species, numerous primates (monkeys, marmosets and others) were deemed endangered, as well as several fireflies, frogs (including many coqui species), turtles and sharks.

In 2019 a global assessment estimated that 1 million species worldwide face extinction if business as usual continues without transformative change. The Center’s Saving Life on Earth plan calls for $100 billion for species and habitat conservation, half the Earth to be protected for wildlife, and dramatic cuts in pollution and plastics.

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Featured image: Forest elephants. Credit: Brett Hartl / Center for Biological Diversity

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This article was first published in October 2020

Note: The Strategic Advisory Group of Experts on Immunization (SAGE) has a mandate to advise the WHO “on overall global policies and strategies, ranging from vaccines and technology, research and development, to delivery of immunization and its linkages with other health interventions.”

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“It’s Easier to Fool People Than It Is to Convince Them That They Have Been Fooled.” – Mark Twain

Dr Mike Yeadon has a degree in biochemistry and toxicology and a research-based PhD in respiratory pharmacology. He has spent over 30 years leading new medicines research in some of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, leaving Pfizer in 2011 as Vice President & Chief Scientist for Allergy & Respiratory. That was the most senior research position in this field in Pfizer. Since leaving Pfizer, Dr Yeadon has founded his own biotech company, Ziarco, which was sold to the world’s biggest drug company, Novartis, in 2017.

Abstract

SAGE made – and continues to make – two fatal errors in its assessment of the SAR-CoV-2 pandemic, rendering its predictions wildly inaccurate, with disastrous results. These errors led SAGE to conclude that the pandemic is still in its early stages, with the vast majority (93%) of the UK population remaining susceptible to infection and that, in the absence of more action, a very high number of deaths will occur.

• Error 1: Assuming that 100% of the population was susceptible to the virus and that no pre-existing immunity existed.
• Error 2: The belief that the percentage of the population that has been infected can be determined by surveying what fraction of the population has antibodies.

Both of these points run entirely counter to known science regarding viruses and to a significant amount of evidence, as I will demonstrate. The more likely situation is that the susceptible population is now sufficiently depleted (now <40%, perhaps <30%) and the immune population sufficiently large that there will not be another large, national scale outbreak of COVID-19. Limited, regional outbreaks will be self-limiting and the pandemic is effectively over. This matches current evidence, with COVID-19 deaths remaining a fraction of what they were in spring, despite numerous questionable practices, all designed to artificially increase the number of apparent COVID-19 deaths.

Introduction

The ‘scientific method’ is what separates us from pre-renaissance peoples, who might tackle plagues with prayer. We can do better, but only if we’re rigorous. If an important theory isn’t consistent with the findings it purports to oversee, then we’ve got it wrong. Honest scientists occasionally are forced to accept they’ve gone astray and the best scientists then go back and distinguish what they’ve assumed from what can be shown beyond reasonable doubt.

After nearly 35 years of work leading teams in new drug discovery, and trained in several biological disciplines, I like to think I’ve a good nose for spotting inconsistencies. I was once told by a very senior person who, at the time, was responsible for an R&D budget similar to the GDP of a small country that they’d noticed I did have an outstanding talent for “spotting faint patterns in sparse data, long before the competition did”. I’ll take that. Sometimes I spot inconsistencies in my own thinking (more commonly, it must be admitted, others do that for me); on other occasions it can be about others’ scientific work. This is an example of the latter – specifically, SAGE.

It is my contention that SAGE made – and tragically, continues to make to this very day – two absolutely central and incorrect assumptions about the behaviour of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and how it interacts with the human immune system, at an individual as well as a population level.

I will show why, if you’re on SAGE and have accepted these two assumptions, you’d believe that the pandemic has hardly begun and that hundreds of thousands of people will probably die in addition to those who’ve died already. I can empathise with anyone in that position. It must cause despair that politicians aren’t doing what you’ve told them they must do.

If, like me, you’re sure that the pandemic, as a ghastly public health event, is nearly over in UK, you will probably be with me in sheer astonishment and frustration that SAGE, the Government and 99% of the media maintain the fiction that this continues to be the biggest public health emergency in decades. I have written about the whole event in detail before (Yeadon et al, 2020). Mortality in the UK in 2020 to date, adjusted for population, lies in 8th place out of the last 27 years. It’s not been that exceptional a year from a mortality point of view.

It’s my view that SAGE has been appallingly negligent and should be dissolved and reconstituted properly.

Crucially, I will show that because the proportion of the population remaining susceptible to the virus is now too low to sustain a growing outbreak at national scale, the pandemic is effectively over and can easily be handled by a properly functioning NHS. Accordingly, the country should immediately be permitted to get back to normal life.

Background

A few pieces of background. In spring, membership of SAGE was initially treated like a state secret. Eventually, membership was revealed. I will say that, for myself, I was disappointed. I looked up the credentials of all the members. There were no clinical immunologists. No one who had a biology degree and a post-doctoral qualification in immunology. A few medics, sure. Several people from the humanities including sociologists, economists, psychologists and political theorists. No clinical immunologists. What there were in profusion – seven in total – were mathematicians. This comprised the modelling group. It is their output that has been responsible for torturing the population for the last seven months or so.

I cannot stress how important it is, whenever you hear the word “model”, that you ask who has the expertise in the thing that’s purportedly being modelled. It is no use whatever if the modellers are earnest and brilliant if they are not top quality experts in the phenomenon being modelled. Because you may be sure that from models come future scenarios – predictions if you will. If the model is constructed by people who are not subject-matter experts about the thing being modelled, then if they’ve constructed it in error, they will not know it. The outputs are expert-neutral, but they’ve assumed a power that is disproportionate. I think I understand why. Back to those pre-renaissance people. In times of uncertainty, those who purport to be expert leech appliers and bile colour interpreters became very important. They are seen to an extent as wizards of the modern age. In short, they are assumed to be seers – those who can foretell the future.

As an aside, it was my misfortune for a few years, while still a VP of respiratory research and new drug discovery, to have no choice but to work with a group of modellers, who had been brought in by credulous senior management. They claimed to be able to model certain pathological disease processes and, because of the insights they said their models would provide, show me new and effective ways to tackle difficult diseases, like severe asthma, idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis and the like. I smelled a rat. I spent many days with them. I would ask, “How do you know that you’ve included in your model all the important biological processes which bear on the output, the patients’ clinical condition?” No answer. I also asked, “How do you know what to assume is the starting condition for each of what you assert are the key variables?” They couldn’t adequately answer that, either. I told them that, if I put my empiricist’s reservations to one aside, and went with the flow, we wouldn’t know for a decade whether that had been the right call. Silence. I didn’t find their help much use. I hope I wasn’t too close-minded. But every one of the team, mostly mathematicians and computer programmers, were clever, earnest and really thought they could help. It’s a lesson I’ve never forgotten.

Flaws in Imperial College’s Modelling

I will now show you the two, absolutely fatal flaws in the infamous model of Imperial College. There may be other weaknesses, but these two alone are sufficient to explain why SAGE thinks the roof is about to fall in, whereas the wet science, the empirical data, says something entirely different. I believe we could, and should, lift every measure that’s in place, certainly everywhere south of the Midlands. It would probably be fine everywhere, but that’s to step into a firefight that is not needed and would detract from the force of my argument.

What are these two assumptions? They are so basic and alluring that you might need to read this twice.

If you don’t have the stomach to wade through all this, have a look at the two pie charts below.

First, the Imperial group decided to assume that, since SARS-CoV-2 was a new virus, “the level of prior immunity in the population was essentially zero”. In other words, “100% of the population was initially susceptible to the virus”.

You will be forgiven for thinking this surely doesn’t matter much and is a scientific debating point, rather than something core and crucial. And isn’t it a reasonable thing to think? I’m afraid it does matter, very much. Its not a reasonable thing to assume, either. I will come back to this first assumption in a moment.

But before that, the second fatal assumption, which was that, over time, the modellers would be able to determine what percentage of the population had so far been infected by surveying what fraction of the population had antibodies in the blood. That number is about 7%.

Surely, this too cannot be so terribly important? And isn’t it true, anyway? Again, I regret to inform the reader that yes, its absolutely central. And no, its not true.

Dr Yeadon has adjusted the size of the susceptible population in Chart 2 so it is between <30% and <40%

These charts are not intended to be mathematically perfect, as it’s not possible to convey all the subtleties of the situation. For example, we know that young children are rarely made ill by the virus and seem poor transmitters. The 10% value captures 2/3rd of those aged 0-11y. The prior immunity segment derives from work conducted entirely in adult volunteers – no children are included in that estimate of the size of the population that has prior immunity. The conclusion these charts seek to convey is that SAGE’s belief that 93% remain susceptible is completely at variance with with data from the world’s best scientists, which shows that the remaining proportion of the population susceptible to the virus is below 40%. So the population as a whole is above the so-called “herd immunity threshold”. The pandemic is effectively over, with small, self-limiting outbreaks which will soon subside.

The Two Wrong Assumptions

Before I come back to the scientific evidence that the modellers have got two, central assumptions wrong, let us just walk through the consequences for policy if these incorrect assumptions are allowed to stand.

Its easiest to show why this matters by reference to a simple graphic (see Chart 1). Let us accept for purposes of illustration SAGE’s first assumption. The pie represents 100% of the UK population, all susceptible to becoming infected by the novel virus. Each infected individual might infect several others nearby. This would be easy, as everyone is susceptible. Now apply SAGE’s second assumption, that around 7% of the UK population has antibodies in the blood (NHS, Aug 2020). Surely it’s logical to accept that “over 90% of the UK population remain susceptible to the virus”, as the most recent SAGE minutes state (SAGE, Sept 21st 2020). To all practical purposes, nothing much has changed. 93% is quite close to 100%. As a scientist, if I had blocked, for example, 7% of an enzyme that converts one biochemical molecule to another in the body, I wouldn’t expect a big response in the patient. And this is, in fact, what SAGE is telling Government behind the scenes and also telling all of us, on the radio and the television news.

Because the SAGE advisors claim so many deaths (43,000) have arisen from so few infections (4.7 million) that implies they accept that an infection fatality ratio of 0.9%. But the person who is pre-eminent in this field, John Ioannidis, has just published the results of his extensive worldwide survey and concluded the best estimate of IFR is around 0.2% (Ioannidis, 2020). SAGE’s estimate of lethality has not been revised downward since about February. It’s not central to this piece, so I’ll just leave it there. I will say though, that history shows that estimates of the lethality of each new infectious agent is always and everywhere overestimated during the event itself. This happens primarily because we undercount the people infected but who displayed no or minor symptoms and also because people, earnestly enough, prefer to err on the side of the precautionary principle. The precautionary principle, taken to extremes, as SAGE has done repeatedly, leads to “collateral damage”. Those not in the model are discounted completely and nothing which happens to them as a result of the model’s outputs and policy responses matters a jot. Thus, the precautionary principle becomes ethically dreadful.

I’ll now tell you what I believe are the real values to be used for those two assumptions. Then I’ll show you how this radically alters the position. If I am correct, the pandemic is weeks from being completely over and is already done and dusted everywhere south of the Midlands (with the possible exception of Wales – I have not tracked the evolution of the pandemic there adequately enough to say).

I’ll also offer some challenges to my own position, because as I’ve said, the adequacy and completeness of a theory can be tested by seeing whether predictions which flow from it actually happen. If the predictions fit observed reality, I would like to think that scientists of all stripes as well as attentive lay people will start to think: “This competing view might well be correct, and if it is, doesn’t that mean a whole lot of things we’re doing need looking at again?” That is my sincere hope and is the sole reason why I’m doing this.

The First Wrong Assumption

To SAGE’s first assumption. I believe that it was ridiculous to have said that, because it’s a novel virus, no one in the population would have immunity and so 100% of the population was, at the start, susceptible to it.

It’s ridiculous because while SARS-CoV-2 is indeed novel, coronaviruses are not. There’s no such thing as an ‘ancestor-less virus’. You will recall at least two, then-novel coronaviruses in the recent past: SARS in 2003 and MERS in 2012 (Zhu et al, 2020). While they didn’t spread worldwide, they are very similar, both at a sequence level and at a structural level, to SARS-CoV-2.

But there’s much more than these infamous coronaviruses. For reasons I don’t understand, given the significance of what I’m about to tell you, none of the so-called medical correspondents and science journalists on radio and TV have ever (as far as I know) spoken of the four, endemic, common-cold inducing coronaviruses. It’s well understood by clinicians and scientists who’ve spent any time reading the scientific literature that at least four coronaviruses circulate freely in UK and elsewhere where they’ve been studied. They have names: OC43, HKU1, 229E and NL63 (Zhu et al, 2020). They were first discovered around 55 years ago and, since they are seasonal (for reasons that are not completely understood), some researchers track their annual arrival and departure. Incidentally, because of the spike protein, which is unique to coronaviruses, but largely shared across the family, any PCR test reliant on primers to the sequences encoding the spike protein might well cross-react and pick up and detect as SARS-CoV-2 anyone having a coronavirus common cold at the time of sampling (see Cepheid Innovation Technical Datasheet). These four coronaviruses are but a handful of the literally scores of respiratory viruses which, together, cause between a quarter and a third of what we call the common cold (Gupta, 2020). Symptoms of infection with any of these endemic coronaviruses cause the constellation of symptoms you’d expect if you get an upper respiratory tract infection, or a cold. Some people get really minor, if any symptoms at all. Some get really heavy colds and it takes a couple of weeks before you throw them off. Regrettably, a few elderly and already ill people die after what in younger, more healthy people, causes no more than a cold.

It is my belief and that of multiple, top quality research groups around the world, that many individuals who’ve been infected by one or more of these endemic, common-cold producing coronaviruses in the past, have a long-lived and robust immunity, not only to those viruses, but to closely related viruses. SARS-CoV-2 is one such closely-related virus. Note the similarity of some of these viruses: SARS-CoV-2 is 80% identical to SARS at the gene level and the fusion subunit of all these common cold coronaviruses has high identity to the equivalent sequence of SARS-CoV-2 (Zhu et al, 2020). In researching this specific information, I came across scientists on discussion boards. One of them, responding to emerging data that immunologists were discovering SAR-CoV-2 reactive T-cells in patients never exposed to the virus, speculated that varying exposure and immunity to common cold coronaviruses might play a role in defining susceptibility to the novel virus. My insight is not new. What surprises me is that no one advising the government has done anything with this information.

As an experienced life scientist, I would have predicted that before any experiments had been done those who’d been infected by any of those common cold-causing coronaviruses would now be carrying a level of resistance – let us call it immunity – to infection by closely-related viruses. At the heart of things, this is because that’s the way the incredible molecular machinery that is the innate and adaptive immune system works. To not expect such cross-over is, I submit, once again to demonstrate the lack of the requisite understanding to build a model reliable enough to use. I’m not going to try to detail all the evidence, though it’s there in the references in my earlier, detailed article (Yeadon et al, 2020) for anyone who wants to examine it. In short, multiple research groups across Europe and the US have shown that no less than 20% and no more than 80% (clustering around 30%) of the population had robust responses of T-cells in their blood to SARS-CoV-2 BEFORE the virus reached their countries. More recently still, a fantastic piece of research in one of the top two leading research journals, Science, was published that explains how so many people had prior immunity to SARS-CoV-2, even though their immune systems had never seen that particular, novel virus (Mateus et al, 2020). At its heart, this latest piece of work used a series of pieces of common cold coronaviruses to see if they would activate those T-cells. They did. And the pieces that were best at doing this are the very same pieces of shared structure that each of them has in common with SARS-CoV-2. I like to explain it by saying: “No, those people had never met SARS-CoV-2 before, but they had tangled with several of its cousins, and prevailed.” Their immune systems will never forget those encounters. This, again, is how it works. There isn’t any substantial doubt about this.

There is no question that this is relevant. The nature of the responses was similar to the type of responses seen in people who had, some years before, been vaccinated and then challenged with whatever was in the vaccine. A study was conducted to see if immunity persisted. It has separately been shown that a group of people who’d been infected by SARS in to around 2003 still had robust T-cell responses to that virus 17 years later (Le Bert et al, 2020). Magically, the same people who had recovered from SARS – 17 years ago – also possessed T-cell immunoreactivity against the novel virus, which their bodies had never seen. This is in the other, top two science journal, Nature. This isn’t even a surprise to people with my training. It’s understood that, though there are several lines of defence in the immune system, such as innate immunity, antibodies and T-cells, it is T-cells which are of central importance in responses to respiratory viruses. Viruses harm you by gaining access to the inside of your cells. They are then beyond the reach of antibodies, which are very large molecules which cannot get inside cells. Your body copes by recognizing viral infection is a very specific way and T-cells are at the very heart of that defence mechanism.

I recognize some people will still express doubts about the claim that a significant minority of people had – and continue to have – prior immunity to SARS-CoV-2. However, I am completely sure that any scientist with good knowledge of the human immune system and of our responses to respiratory viruses will agree “this data is important”. If I put it the other way around and instead ask: “Given these findings, by leading clinical immunologists around the world, who independently have obtained the same findings, do you think its safe for us to ignore it and assume no one has resistance to the virus?” They would reply with a flat: “No.”

I believe I have provided more than adequate evidence that a significant proportion (30%) of the population went into 2020 armed with T-cells capable of defending them against SAR-CoV-2, even though they had never seen the virus. This is because they’d been previously infected by one of more common cold-producing coronaviruses. SAGE was naively wrong to assume “everyone was susceptible”.

The Second Wrong Assumption

I’m now going to turn to the second assumption. Recall that SAGE believes that less than 10% of the population have so far been infected by SARS-CoV-2. The reason they say that, presumably, is because that is the proportion of the population in whose blood antibodies to the virus have been found in seroprevalence surveys (NHS, Aug 2020). I was incredulous that they could possibly believe this was a fair measure of the fraction who’d been infected. I say this because its well understood that not every person, infected by a respiratory virus, goes on to produce antibodies. And many people, having prior immunity, never get properly infected anyway. We know that almost all those who became very unwell and were in hospital did produce antibodies, sometimes such that this could be detected months later. But those who had milder responses to the virus did not all produce antibodies. Those who did produced smaller amounts and often this faded away within a few weeks. Those who had no symptoms or only mild symptoms often made no antibodies at all. What is remarkable though is that all the people studied did have those T-cells in their blood, capable of responding to SARS-CoV-2. They had all become immune to the virus, even though they didn’t all have circulating antibodies. I can make this claim because, of the 750 million people which the WHO recently estimated have been infected so far, almost no one has been reinfected. Yes, a small handful appear to have been reinfected. But note that a far higher proportion than a handful in three quarters of a billion people have various immune deficiencies. These are far outliers. The fact is that people don’t get reinfected. This is normal. Again, it is how the immune system works. If it didn’t, we would not be here. See Burgess et al (2020) for more details.

Back to the low proportion of people who produce antibodies after infection. This also is not a surprise to clinical immunologists and those with a good understanding of mammalian immune systems. Consider this: a large number of young, healthy people don’t need to go through the slow, complex and energy-intensive process of making antibodies. They used other arms of the immune system, such as the so-called innate immune system, to shrug off the virus. Their bodies took a careful note of the invader and prompted T-cells to remember it for the future. But for these people, it was easy to rid themselves of the virus and leave no trace in the form of antibodies.

What we can conclude from this is that SAGE is wrong to rely on percentage seroconversion (antibodies) as a reliable guide to the proportion of the population who’ve been infected. This is a truly dreadful error, one that could not have been made but for the inadequate skillsets of the members of SAGE. I’m sorry, but I have to say it. They had too many mathematicians and no one with the right experience to interpret the data coming in from fieldwork. The only thing beyond this that we can say about the progress of the pandemic in UK is the proportion of people infected is NOT 7%.

It is important to arrive at an estimate for this missing number. If SAGE is right, then many more remain susceptible and at risk than I am saying. What proportion have in fact been infected? There is no easy way to know this. However, I have used two, quite independent methods to estimate it and I’m relieved and pleased that they yield similar estimates. It’s generally true than when you really don’t know a quantity yet must adopt an estimate for some purpose, the ideal way to do this is to use methods whose accuracy or error is independent. If you get similar answers, while it’s not proof, it’s generally considered powerful evidence that the answer is of the right order of size. This is most especially true if predictions made on the strength of the estimates also appear to have been correct. This is true on this occasion, so I personally have high confidence that my estimate is correct.

How Many People Have Really Been Infected?

The first method for estimating the proportion of the population that has been infected by SARS-CoV-2 is, rather grimly, to work backwards from what is known as the infection fatality ratio (IFR). The IFR is an imperfect tool, but it asks the question, if we include a perfect cross-section of the population, how many infections, statistically, are followed by one death? The IFR is being calculated by literally dozens of research groups around the world. Some have intensively surveyed a city during the pandemic and so they have a good handle on how many people were infected over time. Obviously, they know how many died, having tested positive. Looking at reviews of these studies, I think a fair estimate of the IFR is 0.2% (Ioannidis, 2020). To make the arithmetic simple, imagine an IFR of 0.1%. This is the same as saying 1 person in a 1000 (perfectly representative) people die after infection. In this thought experiment, 43,000 deaths (roughly the number who have died with or of SARS-C0V-2 in UK to date) would have been preceded by 43 million infections. An IFR of 0.2% means that I in 500 people infected did succumb and this implies approximately 21.5 million people have been infected. This is 32% of our population of 67 million. That estimate might be a little high, but I’m confident it’s a great deal closer to the real number than SAGE’s 7%.

There is another method, more rough and ready, but it can serve to see what a different approach yields. I mentioned earlier that not every infection goes on to yield antibodies. We know for certain that SAGE’s 7% is a substantial underestimate. I have discussed this issue with a number of scientists in recent months. We agreed that while, at minimum, 7% have been infected, these 7% were mostly the more severely unwell people. For each of these, we believe that between two and three others will have had moderate symptoms (lower amounts of antibodies, most of whose levels will have waned) or light symptoms if any, with very low or no antibodies, and these people will all be missed in serological surveys. This allows me to tentatively convert the raw 7% to values ranging from 21% to 28% (three-fold or four-fold the base value). Despite the numerical gymnastics, which I think are methodologically not unreasonable, the outcome is gratifyingly in agreement with the estimate arrived at by the IFR method.

I believe I have shown by two independent methods that SAGE’s estimate of the proportion of the population who’ve so far been infected by SARS-C0V-2 is a gross and amateur underestimate and that a more realistic estimate is in the mid-20s to low-30s per cent.

Recap

Lets recap. SAGE says everyone was susceptible and only 7% have been infected. I think this is literally unbelievable. They have ignored all precedent in the field of immunological memory against respiratory viruses. They have either not seen or disregarded excellent quality work from numerous, world-leading clinical immunologists which show that around 30% of the population had prior immunity. They should also have excluded from ‘susceptible’ a large subset of the youngest children, who appear not to become infected, probably because their immature biology means their cells express less of the spike protein receptor, called ACE2. I have not assumed all young children don’t participate in transmission, but believe a two thirds value is very conservative. It’s not material anyway.

So SAGE is demonstrably wrong in one really crucial variable: they assumed no prior immunity, whereas the evidence clearly points to a value of around 30% (and nearly 40% if you include some young children, who technically are ‘resistant’ rather than ‘immune’).

To the second assumption, I believe I have systematically dismembered their belief that just 7% have been infected. I have not just dismissed their value but sought to replace it and have done so using two independent methods, yielding a convergent value. It’s not 7% who have been infected, but, according to these two methods, somewhere the mid-20s to low-30s per cent.

Whither the “Second Wave”?

Where does the evidence lead us? SAGE argues that the pandemic has only just begun. This is, of course, palpable nonsense. Even lay people can tell this is a very odd claim. It’s just a respiratory virus. Yes, it’s new, but other than it is apparently a little greater in its lethality than the average seasonal influenzas, it is not more lethal than is flu in its worst years. And like all prior respiratory viruses, they arrive, many become unwell and sadly, some die, generally those of advanced or very advanced age and already chronically ill – and then it fades away.

This hasn’t happened yet, in part, because this is the first “social media pandemic”. People have a moment to moment interest in things they wouldn’t mostly notice, unless they or one of their relatives, sadly, succumbs. As Dr John Lee said recently, “The whole covid drama has really been a crisis of awareness of what viruses normally do, rather than a crisis caused by an abnormally lethal new bug” (Lee, 2020). I do not think Dr Lee goes far enough though. We have been under the writ of this thoroughly incompetent group of unaccountable scientists and modellers for many months. During that time, they have completely upended society in myriad ways. We are now walking around wearing masks! Those of us who’ve studied the practical challenges of getting inhaled drugs into the right places in patients lungs – to treat asthma, for example – know full well that such flimsy pieces of cloth absolutely do not prevent the transmission of respiratory viruses (Macintyre et al, 2015). It seems not to be understood that in the ‘hierarchy of medical evidence’, the results of a well-conducted, randomized clinical trial is not superseded by someone showing you a video of vapour moving around a person’s head.

But the main reason the pandemic hasn’t faded away is simply because SAGE says it hasn’t. Seriously. In practice, it has all but disappeared. Numerous NHS Trusts have had zero deaths for weeks or just a sporadic few. I mentioned earlier that a correct and adequate theory would give rise to testable predictions. Let us examine some of them, resting now on the values I have derived for the percentage of the population who were susceptible and the proportion who have been infected.

As the pie chart shows (see Fig 2), if you accept what I hope I’ve successfully argued are more realistic values than those adopted by SAGE, you can see the crucial difference. The remaining proportion of the population who might get infected, take part in transmission and perhaps become ill and die is now very small, certainly under 40% and possibly less than 30%. I’m told that once the fraction of the population susceptible to infection falls low enough, probably somewhere in the mid-30s, where I think it is now, if not lower (at a national level), then that population can no longer support an expanding outbreak of disease (Lourenco et al, 2020 and Gomez et al, 2020). As a result, it wanes and disappears (to be replaced by the next respiratory virus, perhaps influenza).

I think this is exactly what has happened. In terms of predictions, my take on the pandemic is that, at a national level, the greatly reduced proportion of the population that remains susceptible now means we will not see another large, national scale outbreak of COVID-19. Viruses do not do waves. That’s just a myth based on poor understanding of influenza at the end of WW1, a century ago.

Regional Outbreaks

My perspective does indicate, though, that smaller, regional and self-limiting outbreaks are not only possible, but expected. This is because the country is not a perfect mixing bowl of people. Some areas were hit extremely hard in the spring. But not everywhere. Another prediction is that areas hit the hardest in the spring will not now see any great number of cases and deaths. I point simply to London where, at this stage of the spring part of the pandemic, the capital city alone experienced hundreds of deaths every day. It is over, there. It is most unlikely to return, because the kind of immunity involved is robust and durable. A vulnerable person, walking now in London, is much less likely to catch this virus than in the spring, simply because around them there are now far fewer people carrying it and from whom they might catch it. Think for a moment: that is precisely what IS happening, right now, in London. That’s why the deaths are a tiny fraction of what they were in spring. This matches my prediction. SAGE would say nothing has changed. It clearly has.

A comparison of Covid deaths in the first six weeks of the epidemic with Covid deaths in the last six weeks

I have another prediction. Where we do regrettably see outbreaks, these will develop much more slowly than in the spring because the virus is finding it ever harder to find the next person to infect. With colleagues, we’ve carefully examined all the available data (cases, hospitalizations and deaths). What we see is that the slope of each of the rising variables, despite much error and perhaps a little mischief (false positives, defining as COVID-19 admissions people who had no such symptoms on admission and only tested positive days or even weeks later), is much less steep than in the spring, as my proposition indicates is to be expected towards the end of a national outbreak (see figures below created by RuminatorDan). As the proportion of people who can participate in transmission falls and falls, so eventually the number of people leaving hospital will exceed those being admitted. In each of these regional outbreaks (which by the way, are continuations at lower levels of the primary event, interrupted mostly by summer weather and perhaps partly by restrictions), I expect within a few weeks that the effects will crest and begin to decline. And then, nationally, it will be over. This does appear to be happening in Spain already (OWID).

SAGE is Worse Than Useless

SAGE has nothing useful to tell us. As currently constituted, they have an inappropriate over-weighting in modellers and are fatally deficient in pragmatic, empirical, evidence-led experienced scientists, especially the medical, immunological and expert generalist variety. It is my opinion that they should be disbanded immediately and reconstituted. I say this because, as I have shown, they haven’t a grasp of even the basics required to build a model and because their models are often frighteningly useless (Lee, 2020), a fact of which they seem unaware. Their role is too important for them to get a second chance. They are unlikely to revise their thinking even if they claim they have now fixed their model. The level of incompetence shown by the errors I have uncovered, errors which indirectly through inappropriate ‘measures’, have cost the lives of thousands of people, from avoidable, non-COVID-19 causes, is utterly unforgivable.

As a private individual, I am incandescent with rage at the damage they have inflicted on this country. We should demand more honesty, as well as competence from those elected or appointed to look after aspects of life we cannot manage alone. SAGE has either been irredeemably incompetent or it has been dishonest. I personally know a few SAGE members and with the sole exception of a nameless individual, it is an understatement that they have greatly disappointed me. They have rebuffed well-intentioned and, as it turned out, accurate advice from at least three Nobel laureate scientists, all informing them that their modelling was seriously and indeed lethally in error. Though this may not have made the papers, everyone in the science community knows about this and that SAGE’s inadequate replies are scandalous. I have no confidence in any of them and neither should you.

No Need For a Vaccine

There is absolutely no need for vaccines to extinguish the pandemic. I’ve never heard such nonsense talked about vaccines. You do not vaccinate people who aren’t at risk from a disease. You also don’t set about planning to vaccinate millions of fit and healthy people with a vaccine that hasn’t been extensively tested on human subjects. This much I know after 30 years in the pharmaceutical industry. Yet there are such moves afoot. One thought piece suggests that anyone who refuses vaccination should be subject to indefinite house arrest (Mello et al, 2020). In some countries, there is talk of “no jab, no job”. There have even been job adverts for openings in NHS Wales for people to “oversee the vaccination of the entire population”. Any such proposals are not only completely unnecessary but if done using any kind of coercion at all, illegal. I would completely understand and would consider accepting early use of a vaccine only if done with fully informed consent and, even then, only if offered to the most vulnerable in our community. Other proposals have, to me, the whiff of evil about them and I will oppose them as vigorously as I have followed the pandemic so far.

I am not an epidemiologist. I’m not a mathematician, either. I do think, though, that I’m a highly experienced life scientist, who has held positions of significant responsibility in large organisations set up to identify and advance experimental medicines. I have had to make big decisions from time to time, using every ounce of experience, imagination, ingenuity and often found myself reading at speed into new areas, tentatively getting to grips with new concepts and knowledge. I’ve always been a collaborator, seeking to work with the most talented individuals I could. I’ve done this repeatedly across a more than 30-year career in new drug discovery. To this day, in notionally early retirement, I advise clients who are building new biotechnology companies, who are dealing with very diverse diseases and novel therapeutic approaches. I respectfully suggest that this background has ideally placed me to assess others’ propositions and assumptions and to bring well-grounded science to bear on complex issues, of which the SARS-CoV-2 is but one, albeit perhaps the most important work I’ve ever done.

The main point from these graphs is the trend line. The rising number of cases and deaths is proceeding 4x more slowly now than in the spring. This doesn’t prove that we are nearing the end state, but this observation is consistent with that concept.

Thanks to RuminatorDan for the analyses and figures.

Update: This article was revised on October 21st to enlarge the percentage of the UK population that is still susceptible to infection, from 28% to <30 and <40%.

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References

Yeadon et al (2020). “How Likely is a Second wave?” Lockdown Sceptics, September 7th 2020. Updated September 8th 2020.

NHS (Aug 15 2020).

SAGE minutes (September 21st 2020), Summary of the effectiveness and harms of different non-pharmaceutical interventions.

Burgess, et al. (2020). “Are we underestimating seroprevalence of SARS-CoV-2?“, BMJ, September 3rd 2020

Ioannidis, J. (2020). “Global perspective of COVID‐19 epidemiology for a full‐cycle pandemic“, European Journal of Clinical Investment, October 7th 2020

Zhu, et al (2020). “From SARS and MERS to COVID-19: a brief summary and comparison of severe acute respiratory infections caused by three highly pathogenic human coronaviruses“, Respiratory Research, August 27th 2020

Cepheid Innovation Technical Datasheet (Xpert Xpress SARS-CoV-2), page 32.

Gupta, S. (2020). “Matt Hancock is wrong about herd immunity“, Unherd, October 14th 2020

Mateus et al (2020) “Selective and cross-reactive SARS-CoV-2 T cell epitopes in unexposed humans“, Science, October 2nd 2020

Le Bert et al (2020). “SARS-Cov-2 specific T cell immunity in cases of Covid19 and SARS and uninfected controls“, Nature, July 15th 2020

Lee, J (2020). “The fatal mistake which led to lockdowns“, The Spectator, July 11th 2020

Macintyre et al (2020). “A cluster randomized trial of cloth masks compared with medical masks in healthcare workers“, BMJ Open, April 22nd 2015

Lourenco et al (2020). “The impact of host resistance on cumulative mortality and the threshold of herd immunity for SARS-CoV-2“, MedRxIV, October 1st 2020

Gomez et al (2020). “Individual variation in susceptibility or exposure to SARS-CoV-2 lowers the herd immunity threshold“, MedRxIV, May 21st 2020

Mello, M, et al (2020). “Ensuring uptake of vaccines against SARS-CoV-2“, New England Journal of Medicine, October 1st 2020

Featured image: Chief Medical Officer, Professor Chris Whitty, and Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, give a Coronavirus Data Briefing in 10 Downing Street. Picture by Pippa Fowles/No 10 Downing Street.

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Ed Lehman began protesting for peace during the Vietnam War — and he never stopped. Now, after over 50 years of activism, the Regina resident is being honoured with a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Saskatchewan Council For International Cooperation (SCIC).

Lehman is the editor for the Saskatchewan Peace News, is the head of the Regina Peace Council, a member of Peace Quest Regina, and is also involved with the Making Peace Vigil.

“This award is a recognition of work that I’ve done in the area of global cooperation and social justice and solidarity with people around the world,” Lehman said.

When Lehman first got into activism, the primary issues that caught his attention were imperialism, colonialism, youth unemployment and the mistreatment of First Nations people in Canada.

“This period now that we’re in,” Lehman said. “It seems like all these issues that we were discussing 50 years ago have come to the floor again.”

Lehman has condemned Canada and the United States’s role in perpetuating colonialism domestically and imperialism abroad.

“Personally I feel,” Lehman said. “If we’re going to fight colonialism we have to fight it at home, but we also have to fight what our countries are doing internationally.”

Lehman notes that these issues don’t receive a great deal of coverage in the Canadian media which is why he is always organizing events.

Lehman was nominated for the award by fellow activist and close friend David Gehl.

“[Ed] has been very active,”Gehl  said. “He edits the Saskatchewan Peace News, our regular bulletin. He knows people across Canada in the peace movement in many different organizations. I think he’s a leader.”

“He had a lot of personal experiences that enriched his life,” Gehl said. “He’d seen many different cultures, I think he has quite a rich life experience.”

Gehl and Lehman have been friends since high school. Gehl’s family was heavily involved in politics. Lehman credits his connection to Gehl for changing his views on the Vietnam War during his teenage years, one of the issues that sparked Lehman’s lifelong commitment to peace activism.

 “It’s a lifelong achievement award, and Ed has been very active lifelong for the 50 years that I’ve known him,” Gehl said. “I think he fits the bill. I think he’s been really important for raising the profile of the Regina Peace Council, he’s taken a lot of the initiatives to have the conferences and I know he joined the Canadian Foreign Policy Institute.”

The event is scheduled to happen March 23 from 6:30 to 8:30 CST.  Registration information can be viewed here.

When Ed learned that he was being given the award, he insisted that the virtual event be centred around a discussion of Canadian foreign policy rather than himself.

“I think it’s typical of Ed,” Gehl said. “The SCIC was unable to have a public award ceremony but they did offer to have a public event and Ed wanted it not to focus on him so much as to focus on Canadian foreign policy. So he was able to suggest that they would have a webinar focused on Canadian foreign policy in the 21st century.”

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(4) Karen Horney, Neurosis and Human Growth

(5) Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals/Ecce Homo

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Blinken was clearly speaking from experience. Since the United States dispensed with the UN Charter and the rule of international law to invade Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq, and has used military force and unilateral economic sanctions against many other countries, it has indeed made the world more deadly, violent and chaotic.

But after two decades of unilateral U.S. foreign policy in which the United States has systematically ignored and violated international law, leaving widespread death, violence and chaos in its wake, U.S. foreign policy may finally be coming full circle, at least in the case of Afghanistan.

So, after 20 years of war and lawlessness, is the United States finally ready to give the “rules-based order” a chance to prevail over U.S. unilateralism and “might makes right,” instead of just using it as a verbal cudgel to browbeat its enemies?

What’s going on in Afghanistan?

In February 2020, the Trump administration signed an agreement with the Taliban to fully withdraw U.S. and NATO troops from Afghanistan by May 1, 2021.

The Taliban had refused to negotiate with the U.S.-backed government in Kabul until the U.S. and NATO withdrawal agreement was signed, but once that was done, the Afghan sides began peace talks in March 2020. Instead of agreeing to a full ceasefire during the talks, as the U.S. government wanted, the Taliban only agreed to a one-week “reduction in violence.”

Eleven days later, as fighting continued between the Taliban and the Kabul government, the United States wrongly claimed that the Taliban was violating the agreement it signed with the United States and relaunched its bombing campaign.

Despite the fighting, the Kabul government and the Taliban managed to exchange prisoners and continue negotiations in Qatar, mediated by U.S. envoy Zalmay Khalilzad, who had negotiated the U.S. withdrawal agreement with the Taliban. But the talks made slow progress, and now seem to have reached an impasse.

The coming of spring in Afghanistan usually brings an escalation in the war. Without a new ceasefire, a spring offensive would probably lead to more territorial gains for the Taliban—which already controls at least half of Afghanistan.

This prospect, combined with the May 1st withdrawal deadline for the remaining 3,500 U.S. and 7,000 other NATO troops, prompted Blinken’s invitation to the United Nations to lead a more inclusive international peace process that will also involve India, Pakistan and the United States’s traditional enemies, China, Russia and, most remarkably, Iran.

This process began with a conference on Afghanistan in Moscow on March 18-19, which brought together a 16-member delegation from the U.S.-backed Afghan government in Kabul and negotiators from the Taliban, along with U.S. envoy Khalilzad and representatives from the other countries.

The Moscow conference laid the groundwork for a larger UN-led conference to be held in Istanbul in April to map out a framework for a ceasefire, a political transition and a power-sharing agreement between the U.S.-backed government and the Taliban.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has appointed Jean Arnault to lead the negotiations for the UN. Arnault previously negotiated the end to the Guatemalan Civil War in the 1990s and the peace agreement between the government and the FARC in Colombia, and he was the Secretary-General’s representative in Bolivia from the 2019 coup until a new election was held in 2020. Arnault also knows Afghanistan, having served in the UN Assistance Mission to Afghanistan from 2002 to 2006.

If the Istanbul conference results in an agreement between the Kabul government and the Taliban, U.S. troops could be home sometime in the coming months.

President Trump—belatedly trying to make good on his promise to end that endless  war— deserves credit for beginning a full withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan. But a withdrawal without a comprehensive peace plan would not have ended the war. The UN-led peace process should give the people of Afghanistan a much better chance of a peaceful future than if U.S. forces left with the two sides still at war, and reduce the chances that the gains made by women over these years will be lost.

It took 17 years of war to bring the United States to the negotiating table and another two-and-a-half years before it was ready to step back and let the UN take the lead in peace negotiations.

For most of this time, the U.S. tried to maintain the illusion that it could eventually defeat the Taliban and “win” the war. But U.S. internal documents published by WikiLeaks and a stream of reports and investigations revealed that U.S. military and political leaders have known for a long time that they could not win. As General Stanley McChrystal put it, the best that U.S. forces could do in Afghanistan was to “muddle along.”

What that meant in practice was dropping tens of thousands of bombs, day after day, year after year, and conducting thousands of night raids that, more often than not, killed, maimed or unjustly detained innocent civilians.

The death toll in Afghanistan is unknown. Most U.S. airstrikes and night raids take place in remote, mountainous areas where people have no contact with the UN human rights office in Kabul that investigates reports of civilian casualties.

Fiona Frazer, the UN’s human rights chief in Afghanistan, admitted to the BBC in 2019 that “…more civilians are killed or injured in Afghanistan due to armed conflict than anywhere else on Earth….The published figures almost certainly do not reflect the true scale of harm.”

No serious mortality study has been conducted since the U.S. invasion in 2001. Initiating a full accounting for the human cost of this war should be an integral part of UN envoy Arnault’s job, and we should not be surprised if, like the Truth Commission he oversaw in Guatemala, it reveals a death toll that is ten or twenty times what we have been told.

If Blinken’s diplomatic initiative succeeds in breaking this deadly cycle of “muddling along,” and brings even relative peace to Afghanistan, that will establish a precedent and an exemplary alternative to the seemingly endless violence and chaos of America’s post-9/11 wars in other countries.

The United States has used military force and economic sanctions to destroy, isolate or punish an ever-growing list of countries around the world, but it no longer has the power to defeat, re-stabilize and integrate these countries into its neocolonial empire, as it did at the height of its power after the Second World War. America’s defeat in Vietnam was a historical turning point: the end of an age of Western military empires.

All the United States can achieve in the countries it is occupying or besieging today is to keep them in various states of poverty, violence and chaos—shattered fragments of empire adrift in the twenty-first century world.

U.S. military power and economic sanctions can temporarily prevent bombed or impoverished countries from fully recovering their sovereignty or benefiting from Chinese-led development projects like the Belt and Road Initiative, but America’s leaders have no alternative development model to offer them.

The people of Iran, Cuba, North Korea and Venezuela have only to look at Afghanistan, Iraq, Haiti, Libya or Somalia to see where the pied piper of American regime change would lead them.

What is this all about?

Humanity faces truly serious challenges in this century, from the mass extinction of the natural world to the destruction of the life-affirming climate that has been the vital backdrop of human history, while nuclear mushroom clouds still threaten us all with civilization-ending destruction.

It is a sign of hope that Biden and Blinken are turning to legitimate, multilateral diplomacy in the case of Afghanistan, even if only because, after 20 years of war, they finally see diplomacy as a last resort.

But peace, diplomacy and international law should not be a last resort, to be tried only when Democrats and Republicans alike are finally forced to admit that no new form of force or coercion will work. Nor should they be a cynical way for American leaders to wash their hands of a thorny problem and offer it as a poisoned chalice for others to drink.

If the UN-led peace process Secretary Blinken has initiated succeeds and U.S. troops finally come home, Americans should not forget about Afghanistan in the coming months and years. We should pay attention to what happens there and learn from it. And we should support generous U.S. contributions to the humanitarian and development aid that the people of Afghanistan will need for many years to come.

This is how the international “rules-based system,” which U.S. leaders love to talk about but routinely violate, is supposed to work, with the UN fulfilling its responsibility for peacemaking and individual countries overcoming their differences to support it.

Medea Benjamin is cofounder of CODEPINK for Peace, and author of several books, including Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher with CODEPINK and the author of Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.

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***

Despite a failed military coup attempt by Guaido with Washington’s backing in April 2019 in Venezuela, the Biden administration reinstate Juan Guaido as the “interim president” again!

While the Biden administration continues Trump’s disastrous “maximum pressure” sanctions against the Venezuelan people, Wall Street and foreign oil companies push to lift a ban on diesel fuel swaps with Venezuela to regain their profits.

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Massoud Nayeri is a graphic designer and an independent peace activist based in the United States. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Massoud Nayeri

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***

Well, I’ve had personally the privilege of witnessing the poverty, the trauma, the displacement due to suffered by local communities in Damascus, Sydnaya, Latakia, Homs and at last of Aleppo, visited several times. And I continue to seek to raise the suffering of the people in parliament. Just as a reminder, over nine million Syrians are food insecure at the moment, and an estimated nine out of 10 live below the poverty line and million Syrians in parliament and the suffering of the people.

And in January this year, I sent a letter to the British prime minister, Boris Johnson, to urge the lifting of economic sanctions against Syria. The letter was signed by 80 other people, including many colleagues in the House of Lords, two former British ambassador to Syria, one of them, my friend Peter Ford, and other people from different arenas, George Tenet, the former chief of general staff of the British Army, north west of spitted former first sea lord and chief of naval staff.

And someone you heard earlier, of course, the right Reverend Dr Ted Williams, the former archbishop of Canterbury and many other people. It was also signed by international diplomats, human rights experts and some of the most senior church leaders in the Middle East. They briefly on this is the prime minister for the call to the United Nations, special rapporteur on unilateral coercive measures. And they don’t do it. Who appealed at the end of December, the United States, to lift its complex web of economic sanctions that severely harm the people of Syria.

Sanctions that have not been approved by the UN Security Council. The special rapporteur stated that US sanctions, I quote, violate the human rights of Syrian people and also could exacerbate the already humanitarian situation in Syria, especially in the case of Covid-19 pandemic, end of quote. They suffer what they call suffering by blocking the aid, trade and investment necessary, the serious health system and economy to function. The special rapporteurs findings reflect a growing consensus within humanitarian aid and human rights communities that the sanctions are driving Syria into an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe. I could give a lot more details. You’ve had enough already, and I know speaking out of turn because of our network connections. But I would just highlight the sanctions cure just as surely as bombs dropped.

Bombs can be aimed at military targets and sometimes, unfortunately, civilian targets and the sanction regimes nearly everyone suffers from in Syria. Effects have been devastating. Millions of people out of work, skyrocketing prices and poverty, a crippled health care system and hunger and death for many of the most vulnerable. It is high time the undeclared economic war being waged against the Syrian people by the United States, United Kingdom, European Union and their allies to come to an end.

And I hope very much that the important conference will help to bring that around.

So moving from there tonight, from there, sorry, I move to what I should do, which is to have the great privilege of giving what I just like to offer a very profound vision thanks to all the distinguished people, because this is very, very important conflict.

We’ve been so fortunate to work with speakers from Syria, from the front line of faith and freedom and other experts from around the world, and most importantly, to hear voices in country who don’t hear enough of in Britain and to hear the heartbreaking realities that exist in Syria today and to hear the truths that are so often hidden in mainstream narratives.

And you have to just the BBC like I do, I’ve complained again and increased the coverage of Syria related to areas in the region.

So a huge many of those who face the pressure, so many people have a lot of pressure not to take part in such a conference.

They’ve had the courage to speak out and they will pay a high price. But we’re here because we believe we believe in the truth. We believe in the need because of the suffering. The people of the Syrian crisis began 10 years ago today. The suffering of the Syrian people has gone on, as we all know, to be here for far too long. And the current policies of the international community are only prolonging violence and instability in the country and compounding the profound suffering of millions of people, innocent people.

So I passionately hope that the voices today will promote. A path to stability and peace. And finally, of course, thank you so much, Dr. Makram and the European Center for the Study of Extreme Extremism. And disorganized, because I’ve been running around trying to get my network and organize this very important event, but seriously, I’m sure we all hope and pray that what we have heard today echoes in the corridors of power. And challenges the people to reflect on the too often unreported realities in this context.

And as I say, very, very biased reporting. I’m sure we’re all aware and to support Syria to decide its own future and to rebuild your magnificent country, its wonderful history in a way that is the wishes of the Syrian people and to bring hope, peace and freedom for your people. You’ve suffered for far too long without it. You’ve deserved it for a long time. And I’m sure everyone has taken part in this very, very important conference, which we do thank you very much for arranging, will agree that it is long overdue that the people of Syria are respected for wonderful history, respected for your civilization, and respected for the contribution you can make the world when countries such as the United States in my own country stop penalizing you and allow you to develop your own justice, peace, freedom and democracy.

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The Rise of the Eurasian Century. The China -India -Pakistan Triangle

By Andrew Korybko, March 25 2021

Fast-moving recent developments inspire hope that the Eurasian Century is rising a lot quicker than even the most optimistic observers could have expected.

Anthony Blinken at NATO Summit: Nord Stream 2 Is “Bad for Europe”, “Bad for the US”

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, March 25 2021

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken was categorical; At the NATO venue in Brussels on March 23, he stated in no uncertain terms that Nord Stream 2 was a bad idea. “Bad for Europe, bad for the US”

Sowing The Seeds of War. China and Russia’s Lack of Trust. “Washington’s Hegemonic Aspirations Could Result in a Devastating War”

By Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, March 25 2021

China Is Losing Patience with Washington. “You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry,” China tells Washington, and China is getting angry.

“The One Who Accuses Is the One Who Is” – President Putin’s Response to Biden’s Calling Him a “Killer”

By Peter Koenig, March 25 2021

When President Putin spoke later to the media in Moscow, answering a question about his reaction to Biden’s accusing him to be a “killer”, Putin just said, “I wish him good health, and I mean it without irony.”

Facts About COVID-19

By Swiss Policy Research, March 25 2021

Lethality: According to the latest immunological studies, the overall infection fatality rate (IFR) of covid-19 in the general population is about 0.1% to 0.5% in most countries, which is most closely comparable to the medium influenza pandemics of 1957 and 1968.

America Against the World: Everyone Is a “Frenemy”. Putin is a “Killer” Russia “Must Pay the Price”

By Philip Giraldi, March 25 2021

There are certainly a number of reasons why the United States government is now only viewed favorably by the Israelis, but totally tone deaf foreign and economic policies have to be right up there in how the world sees Washington.

India: A Year of Pandemic, Deadlock, Disaster and Dissent

By Adv Dr Shalu Nigam, March 25 2021

The virus has not only resulted in damages resulting in high mortality and morbidity, but it has also made adverse qualitative changes in the lives of billions while its socio-political repercussions have devastated economies in the Global South.

In a Shift, Pakistan Suing for Peace with India

By FM Shakil, March 25 2021

Pakistan has unveiled a new “geo-economic vision” that offers to “bury the past” with neighboring rival India if it reciprocates with a “relaxation” on the two sides’ long-running dispute over Kashmir.

Russia, China to Resist US but Engagement Is Preferred Option

By M. K. Bhadrakumar, March 25 2021

The US President Joe Biden’s “killer” remark about his “soulless” Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin was outrageous by any yardstick — even by his own long history of diplomatic gaffes. But Moscow won’t accept it as a sign of dementia.

Increasing Nukes and Trimming the Military: Global Britain’s Skewed Vision

By Dr. Binoy Kampmark, March 25 2021

Nuclear weapon states and their allies still persisted in calling the document unhelpful and unrealistic; the self-appointed realists have preferred the go-slow approach of disarmament, a form of moderated insanity.

Does Weed-killing Chemical “Paraquat” Cause Parkinson’s Disease? Multiple Law Suits in the U.S.

By U.S. Right to Know, March 25 2021

Multiple lawsuits are pending in the United States alleging the weedkilling chemical paraquat causes Parkinson’s disease, and the first case to go to trial over the allegations against Syngenta over paraquat and Parkinson’s was originally scheduled for April 12 but was rescheduled for May 10 in St. Clair County Circuit Court in Illinois.

All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

***

The intensity of the conflict in Syria’s northeast refuses to die down, as more and more strikes are carried out targeting each involved party’s  interests.

For its part, MSM reports on all of these, but many of them are presented in a light, much different from reality.

On March 23^rd, a video emerged showing the Damascus government forces conduct a strike on Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS).

The shelling targeted the terrorist fortifications and depots. MSM, in conjunction with various Western-backed organizations such as the “International Rescue Committee”, shifted the story and claimed that a civilian hospital had been struck.

As such, the narrative is this – the “Bloody Assad Regime” is back at it, targeting civilians and killing its own people.

As might be expected this media campaign is part of the attempts by the US to rebrand HTS as a “former terrorist” and now reformed organization, in order to have another ally, in a different part of Syria.

The Damascus government’s recent punishment of HTS and the Turkish-backed militants in northeastern Syria is happening with Russian support and is part of a wider push to liberate more areas of Syria.

Ankara is dissatisfied with this, even summoning the Russian Ambassador to complain about the severe strikes that Moscow had carried out on terrorist targets.

The Turkish side insists that artillery and air strikes on positions and infrastructure of Turkish-funded terrorists in Greater Idlib violated the ‘de-escalation agreement’. No mentions were made of the violations that are frequently carried out by these same terrorists.

Turkey would like to continue to enjoy the smuggled oil it used to receive from the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces.

The United States, still benefits from that smuggled oil. On March 23^rd, a convoy of more than 300 tankers left Syria’s Hasaka region and entered Iraq.

Washington’s oil repatriation is not proceeding without a hitch either. On March 23^rd, several rockets hit a US military base near the Conico oil field in the Syrian province of Deir ez-Zor. Lebanon’s al-Mayadeen TV reported that the US suffered casualties. Little else is known.

Being subject to rocket strikes, and having convoys hit by IEDs was commonplace in Iraq, but it appears that it has now also come to plague Washington’s forces in Syria.

The profits from that smuggled oil could potentially be used to cover a recent loss by the US – an MQ-9 Reaper was downed in Yemen, by Ansar Allah.

Despite officially not supporting the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen, the Biden Administration appears to still be up to Washington’s old activities.

The Houthis, as Ansar Allah is commonly known, are riding high due to their recent successes and continue their regular drone strikes on various Saudi positions and infrastructure behind enemy lines.

The Abha Airport, alongside other locations in the south of the Kingdom, is subject to frequent attacks.

Riyadh is providing ample opposition, carrying out approximately 30 or more airstrikes each day. Still, it would seem that the Saudi-led coalition is being steadily pushed back.

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I often quote one simple statement by Nawal El-Saadawi– a bold and brilliant retort to a question put to her by an NPR radio host many years ago. A lesson for me, but for many others too.

I was accompanying the Egyptian writer to the Manhattan studio of the national radio network, and sat behind her in the glass-walled booth as the interview got underway. It was the early 1990s when the Western public was newly aware of Muslim people—as individual women and men. The interviewer (a well-known radio personality) actually began with a question other guests might stumble over, be outraged by, or possibly be moved to cancel the discussion altogether.

“Are you a good Muslim?”, asked the host.

Nawal’s reply? Cool and succinct, but not unkind– as was her habit:

“That’s between God and me.”

This retort made an enormous impression on me personally, but also informed my understanding of media’s subtle ways of controlling dialogue. El-Saadawi’s handling of that question later inspired my widely circulated article Is She Muslim?.

Today, as news of her passing spreads, it’s gratifying to read the many tributes to the inimitable author and activist Nawal El-Saadawi. She completed 89 years of an extraordinary life and career that went from early medical work into villages of her native Egypt, to authorship of autobiographies and novels, to incarceration following her criticisms of Anwar Sadat, to international conferences, and visiting professorships in the West.

She was extraordinary on all fronts– highly energetic intellectually and physically, relishing any opportunity to dialogue and to criticize, infinitely patient and ready to explain over and over again for an infinitely naïve public the links between patriarchy and capitalism, between patriarchy and a myopic Western feminism, to build her Arab Women’s Solidarity Association, and to continue writing.

As you will hear in this audio clip from my February, 2000 interview with her, how El-Saadawi possessed a powerful voice and a skill to make clear seemingly complex issues.

Although she frequently visited the West to speak and teach, and however tense and threatening the politics in her homeland, she always returned there to write and to involve herself in the ongoing insecurity and political upheaval within Egypt.

I met Dr. Nawal on many occasions, both in U.S.A. and in Cairo. Our first meeting was during one of her visits to New York in the early 1990s when she was seen largely as a ‘loose cannon’. Oh, she was unpredictable. No one in that largely middle-class NGO audience knew what to expect. But she was gaining attention as an Arab spokesperson. Not only was the ‘Arab woman’ a new phenomenon to be seen and heard in person. Islam was growing in controversy following Salman’s Rushdie’s Satanic Verses and the newly established theocracy in Iran.

El-Saadawi first came to prominence with her 1980 book The Hidden Face of Eve: Women in the Arab World. There, she exposed to the global community, the physical mistreatment of young women in her country through a puberty rite later labeled ‘female genital mutilation’. Her exposé was sensational in a way that embarrassed many Arabs and Muslims. It was incorrectly associated with Islamic teachings and it aroused in the wider public a very negative image of both Islam and Arab women as victims of Islam. (To the present, those connections persist in the minds of many.)

I don’t know if El-Saadawi ever was able to shed her close association with that issue; the concept which shocked so many may have pursued her reputation to the end. This she would doubtless find unfortunate. Because her understanding of Islam was not at all negative and her exploration of women in history and society was deep and enlightening.

She understood cultural underpinnings more deeply than most anthropologists and sociologists. She often talked about how, in its own way, Western culture and secular rituals ‘mutilate’ Western women who are furthermore subject to their own ‘veiling’ prescriptions. She shocked us with analogies she drew between East and West, pointing out the bizarre practices and demands on women by Western culture. Some radical feminists understood this. But few others did. As for reforming our Western habits, she always returned to the barriers of patriarchy.

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This was originally published on the author’s blog site.

BN Aziz whose anthropological research has focused on the peoples of the Himalayas is the author of the newly published “Yogmaya and Durga Devi: Rebel Women of Nepal”, available on Amazon. 

Featured image: El-Saadawi (r) with her husband, novelist Sherif Hetata, 1990 (Source: Barbara Nimri Aziz)

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***

Fast-moving recent developments inspire hope that the Eurasian Century is rising a lot quicker than even the most optimistic observers could have expected. The relevant events are last month’s Chinese-Indian synchronized disengagement and the Indian-Pakistani ceasefire, the US’ threats to sanction India for its planned purchase of Russia’s S-400 air defense systems, the scandals that America provoked last week with China and Russia, last week’s inaugural Islamabad Security Dialogue, and the latest progress in resolving the Afghan War. The importance of all five will now be briefly discussed prior to putting them into the larger strategic context.

The China-India-Pakistan triangle over the UNSC-recognized disputed territory of Kashmir always had a high conflict potential, which the world was reminded of during the Indian-Pakistani air battle of February 2019 and last summer’s Chinese-Indian clashes in the Galwan River Valley.

All sides to their credit realized that their interests are best served by stabilizing the tense situation there through last month’s earlier mentioned synchronized disengagement and ceasefire. This de-escalates everything and creates a conductive environment for peacefully resolving their disagreements.

The US’ repeated threats to sanction India for its planned purchase of Russia’s S-400 air defense systems will also improve the security situation in Eurasia, as strange as it may sound. India must by now realize that the US isn’t as reliable of an ally as some in the country had previously thought. America is attaching unacceptable political, economic, and strategic strings to military cooperation with India through the Quad that many suspect is tacitly aimed at containing China. Should Washington go through with its threats, then New Delhi might in turn take a step back from the Quad, which would by default further improve Chinese-Indian relations.

Last week’s Anchorage meeting between Chinese and American diplomats ended with the latter patronizingly talking down to the former and thus preventing a lot of meaningful progress from being made. In addition, US President Joe Biden’s agreement with an interviewer who asked him whether he thought that Russian President Vladimir Putin was a “killer” prompted Moscow to recall its ambassador for the first time since 1998. Coincidentally, Russia’s Foreign Minister visited Beijing this week to discuss strengthening bilateral ties, which aren’t aimed against any third party such as the US but are only intended to improve the situation in Eurasia.

The inaugural Islamabad Security Dialogue was also held last week and saw Prime Minister Imran Khan, Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi, and Chief Of Army Staff General Qamar Javed Bajwa jointly present Pakistan’s new multipolar grand strategy. Importantly, Islamabad encouraged New Delhi to take the first step towards resolving their dispute over Kashmir in order for Pakistan to then facilitate Indian connectivity with Afghanistan, the Central Asian Republics, and beyond (perhaps as far as Russia and the EU too). This very friendly outreach could revolutionize Eurasia’s economic connectivity capabilities if India positively responds to Pakistan.

Finally, the recent progress that’s been made on peacefully resolving the Afghan War could unlock the potential for Central Asian-South Asian connectivity. This is especially so when considering last month’s agreement between Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Uzbekistan to construct a railway between them. Keeping in mind the Pakistani political, diplomatic, and military leaderships’ unprecedented joint outreach to India last week, then the plausible possibility exists of finally pioneering a Central Asian-South Asian connectivity corridor upon the eventual end of the Afghan War. This would unquestionably be to all of the Eurasian supercontinent’s benefit.

Altogether, the fast-moving developments of recent weeks strongly point to the rise of the Eurasian Century. China, India, Pakistan, and Russia all share the same goal of improving connectivity between them and their many partners, with their visions increasingly converging in light of the latest events.

The best-case scenario is that the Chinese-Indian synchronized disengagement and Indian-Pakistani ceasefire hold in parallel with meaningful progress being made on resolving the Afghan War and the Kashmir dispute. That outcome would enable all players to more easily resist the US’ divide-and-rule schemes and thus ensure a win-win future for all.

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This article was originally published on OneWorld.

Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from OneWorld

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***

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken was categorical; At the NATO venue in Brussels on March 23, he stated in no uncertain terms that Nord Stream 2  was a bad idea. “Bad for Europe, bad for the US”

Below is the substance of his statement on behalf of President Biden: 

“President Biden has been very clear, he believes the pipeline is a bad idea, bad for Europe, bad for the United States, ultimately it is in contradiction to the EU’s own security goals,”

“It has the potential to undermine the interests of Ukraine, Poland and a number of close partners and allies,”  (quoted by Reuters)

The US sponsored propaganda campaign is ongoing with a view to ultimately stalling the Nord Stream 2 pipeline project.

The project is 95% completed. It is scheduled to be launched in September, 2021.

Is the US intent upon sabotaging this 9.3 billion dollar project?

Sanctions against the EU are ongoing. The CO2 climate discourse is being used profusely to stall Nord Stream 2.

The Biden administration in mid-March made clear it is committed to complying with the sanctions legislation put in place with bipartisan support in Congress, and called on companies involved to “immediately abandon work on the pipeline”. This dampened expectations for a deal between Germany and the U.S., which arose when the Biden administration did not sanction new entities involved in the project in late February. (Clean Energy Wire)

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***

Multiple lawsuits are pending in the United States alleging the weedkilling chemical paraquat causes Parkinson’s disease, and the first case to go to trial over the allegations against Syngenta over paraquat and Parkinson’s was originally scheduled for April 12 but was rescheduled for May 10 in St. Clair County Circuit Court in Illinois. The trial is expected to be delayed due to precautions related to the Covid-19 virus.

That Illinois case – Hoffman V. Syngenta – is one of several pending against Syngenta alleging the company’s paraquat products cause Parkinson’s Disease. The Hoffman case also names Chevron Phillips Chemical Co. and Growmark Inc. as defendants. Chevron distributed and sold Gramoxone paraquat product in the United States in an agreement with a Syngenta predecessor called Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI), which introduced paraquat-based Gramoxone in 1962. Under a license agreement, Chevron had the right to to manufacture, use, and sell paraquat formulations in the U.S.

Lawyers around the United States are advertising for plaintiffs, seeking to draw in thousands of people who’ve been exposed to paraquat and now suffer from Parkinson’s.

One of the most recently filed cases was brought in federal court. That lawsuit is Durbin V. Syngenta.

Several scientific studies have linked paraquat to Parkinson’s, including a large study of U.S. farmers jointly overseen by multiple U.S. government agencies.  Farmers use paraquat in the production of many crops, including corn, soy and cotton.

Parkinson’s is an incurable progressive nervous system disorder that limits a person’s ability to control movement, causing tremors, loss of balance and eventually often leaving victims bedridden and/or bound to a wheelchair. The disease is not necessarily fatal but typically becomes severely debilitating.

Dutch neurologist Bastiaan Bloem, who recently authored a book about Parkinson’s, blames widespread exposure to herbicides such as paraquat, along with other toxic chemicals used in agriculture and manufacturing, for the spread of the disease.

Acutely Toxic 

Along with fears about links between paraquat and Parkinson’s, paraquat is also known to be an extremely acutely toxic chemical that can quickly kill people who ingest very small amounts. In Europe, the sale of paraquat has been banned since 2007, but in the United States the pesticide is sold as a “Restricted Use Pesticide” due to “acute toxicity.”

As part of discovery in the Parkinson’s litigation, lawyers have obtained internal records from Syngenta and its predecessor corporate entities dating back to the 1960s. Many of these documents are sealed, but some have started to come to light.

Those unsealed discovery documents, which include copies of letters, minutes of meetings, study summaries, and emails, are being made available on this page.

Most of the documents unsealed to date deal with corporate discussions about how to keep paraquat herbicides on the market despite its deadliness, through measures designed to reduce accidental poisonings. Specifically, many of the documents detail an internal corporate struggle over the addition of an emetic, a vomit-inducing agent, to paraquat products.  Today, all Syngenta paraquat-containing products include an emetic called “PP796.”  Liquid paraquat-containing formulations from Syngenta also include a stenching agent to produce a foul odor, and a blue dye to differentiate the dark-colored herbicide from tea or cola or other beverages.

EPA Review 

Paraquat is currently undergoing the EPA’s registration review process, and on Oct. 23, 2020, the agency  released a proposed interim decision (PID) for paraquat, which proposes mitigation measures to reduce human health and ecological risks identified in the agency’s 2019 draft human health and ecological risk assessments.

The EPA said that through collaboration with the National Toxicology Program at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, the agency completed a “thorough review” of the scientific information on paraquat and Parkinson’s Disease and concluded that the weight of evidence was insufficient to link paraquat to Parkinson’s disease. The agency published this “Systematic Review of the Literature to Evaluate the Relationship between Paraquat Dichloride Exposure and Parkinson’s Disease.”

USRTK will add documents to this page as they become unsealed.

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The Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC) published a report showing that China broke the world record for most wind power capacity installed in a single year in 2020, with 52 gigawatts (GW) of new capacity — doubling the country’s annual installations compared to the previous year.

“The incredible and rapid growth of wind power in the region has been led by China, which now has more wind power capacity than Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America combined,” said Feng Zhao, head of market intelligence and strategy at the GWEC.

“We were expecting an installation rush in China last year due to the phase-out of the onshore wind Feed-in-Tariff by the end of 2020, but the Chinese wind market exceeded our original forecasts by over 73 percent,” Zhao added.

“Top-down policies requiring wind and solar be integrated into the power grid, rather than subsidy support, would probably drive the greater transition to renewables”, Liang Wanliang, a China director for the GWEC, said.

UNCTAD Trade and Development Report 2020 shows that China's export recovery in the second half of 2020 is better than expected and projects China's economic growth at 8.1% in 2021. It reflects the international community's confidence in China's economic development. pic.twitter.com/kygBXWTXmg

— Spokesperson发言人办公室 (@MFA_China) March 19, 2021

China’s Central Committee for Financial and Economic Affairs on Monday addressed that its country needed a new kind of electrical system centered around new energy, which was interpreted as a signal of continued strong policy support for renewables.

This Asian country aim to have CO2 emissions peak before 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality before 2060, and its government moves sparked optimism for a breakthrough in global climate negotiations.

Meanwhile, the share of clean energy consumption in China has risen from 19.1 percent in 2016 to 24.3 percent in 2020, according to China’s National Bureau of Statistics.

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Featured image: Workers installing an offshore wind turbine at a wind farm, Fuqing, China, June 12, 2020. | Photo: Xinhua

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On March 16, 2021, ABC anchor George Stephanopoulos held an exclusive interview with President Joe Biden. In the context of the United States’ chief intelligence office releasing an unclassified report on foreign meddling in the 2020 US election, concluding that Russian President Vladimir Putin oversaw sweeping efforts aimed at “denigrating” President Joe Biden’s candidacy, Biden told Stephanopoulos that he had warned Putin about a potential response during a call in late January.

This is verbatim the ABC News Report of March 17, 2021:

“He will pay a price,” Biden said. “We had a long talk, he and I, when we — I know him relatively well. And the conversation started off, I said, “I know you and you know me. If I establish this occurred, then be prepared.”

Stephanopoulos then asked: “So you know Vladimir Putin. You think he’s a killer?”

“Mmm hmm, I do,” Biden replied.

Stephanopoulos: “So, what price is he going to pay?”

Biden: “The price he is going to pay, well, you’ll see shortly.”

Stephanopoulos also asked Biden, when you met him (Putin, in the past), you told him that he didn’t have a soul… and Biden retorted: yes, I told him. And Putin responded, “we understand each other.”

When President Putin spoke later to the media in Moscow, answering a question about his reaction to Biden’s accusing him to be a “killer”, Putin just said, “I wish him good health, and I mean it without irony.”

Speaking on television, reflecting philosophically, Putin said,

“I remember when we were young, playing in the playground and accusing each other of little things, we always see ourself in the mirror and project our own image of ourselves on to the other, like “the one who accuses is the one who did it”.

President Putin last Thursday (18 March) challenged Biden to talk, “I invite President Biden to talk on Friday or on Monday publicly online live…” to which Biden did not respond. Presumably given Biden’s often confused mind, to put it benignly, he was advised to abstain from such a conversation with President Putin.

The tension between the US and Russia has hardly been stronger and the diplomatic relation between the two countries is at its lowest in the past decades. President Putin recalled immediately the Russian Ambassador from Washington for “consultation” – a euphemism for declaring a serious rupture in the relationship of the two countries.

Later in a small media gathering in Moscow, Mr. Putin said he would deal with America on his terms. He also philosophized about Biden’s thoughtless slandering, when he talked to ABC’s anchor Stephanopoulos. He referred to children accusing one another, the going saying is, “the one who accuses is the one who is”. This is equally valid for adults.

When later asked at a Press Conference whether Biden regretted having suggested Putin was a “killer”, the White House Press Secretary, Jen Psaki, replied, “No. The President gave a straight answer to a straight question.” – That reflects all too well the intellectual and diplomatic level of US Presidents and their entourage. Though Biden may be a special case of being a blind-folded bully, previous US Presidents’ track record is not much better.

President Putin is one of the world’s most brilliant Statesman. The other one is China’s President Xi Jinping.

Together, their alliance, their vision and diplomacy, their conflict avoidance – and constant search for peaceful solutions to world disorders – have kept our planet out of a nuclear Armageddon for the last couple of decades. That’s quite an achievement, given the warmongers in Washington and by extension in Europe – and given the over two-dozen NATO bases in Europe, inching ever closer to the gates of Moscow and surrounding China – all the way through the South China Sea.

Obama once promised he would station more than half of the US Navy fleet in the South China Sea, making sure China was surrounded from everywhere. He made true on his promise. Its Obama’s infamous “Pivot to Asia”. And so, he did with Russia. That included and still includes deadly economic sanctions on countries that once-upon-a-time counted with Washington – and Europe – as partners.

How many people were killed by these sanctions in North Korea, Russia, China?

How many were – and still are – being killed by the totally illegal sanctions – illegal by any standards of international law – in Cuba, Venezuela, Syria, Libya, Iran, Pakistan, DPRK (North Korea) – and by extension through Israel in Palestine – and many more nations of our planet?

– Let alone the “eternal war on terror” – an invention to keep killing people for the good of the United States, for their control over humanity – and not least for the enormous profit bonanza of the US military industrial complex.

Shall we mention the mass killing caused by President Clinton when he initiated NATO intervention in former Yugoslavia;

or the six still ongoing wars, initiated by President father Bush with the first Gulf war in 1991, then officially expanded by son Bush in 2001 and 2003 with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, then further expanded by four more wars in the Middle East – Libya, Syria, Sudan and Yemen – under the Obama Administration.

And how about the explicitly Obama-approved massive extra-judiciary drone killings around the world, with focus on the Middle East?

Aren’t we talking about tens and tens of thousands of deaths, assassinated people, a genocide by US presidents with the complicity of so-called European leaders (sic)?

Did President Putin and President Xi ever call them “killers” or murderers? – They could have, but they didn’t.

However, that is what President Putin meant when he referred to Biden’s call him a “killer” –

“I’m rubber and you are glue. Whatever you say bounces off of me and sticks to you”, or rather “the one who accuses is the one who is”.

The emperor and the emperor’s servants are a cabal of “killers” – a better fitting term is mass murderers.

Now President Biden, then VP to Obama was an intimate part of it, of clamping down on Russia and China. Biden was also part of the intensification of the Iraq war, as well as of the destruction of Libya and the brutal murder of President Qadhafi. Though Hillary’s initiative (then Obama’s Secretary of State), Biden fully supported her.

So, President Putin’s wise response was remarkable. See video below.

“The one who accuses is the one who is” – he said, referring to a psychic wisdom that one looks in the mirror when accusing others of a crime or a sin.

In other words, Biden projects his own character onto Putin. Mr. Putin, politely and diplomatically said, they were different, had different cultures and different values. He also wished President Biden good health – genuinely good health, no irony, he stressed.

Before closing on such a conciliatory note, Putin referred to some American atrocities, dating back to the very beginning of American history which started with the indiscriminate slaughter of tens of thousands of indigenous Americans, for which American Presidents were responsible.

Also mentioned should be the brutal killings in Iraq, with special focus on the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, as well as Afghanistan’s Bagram Airbase detention center and lately the infamous Pul-e-Charkhi Prison, also known as the Afghan National Detention facility, outside of Kabul – and renovated by the US Corps of Engineers to accommodate war prisoners taken by US / NATO forces. And not least, nor last, the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp in Cuba.

These are just a few of the hundreds of detention camps around the world, where thousands of prisoners were tortured and executed under orders and supervision of the US / NATO. Since WWII an estimated 20 to 30 million people were killed due to direct or indirect US intervention around the world. War crimes abound.

Yet, Mr. Putin didn’t call any of the US Presidents a “killer”. But it is crystal clear what he meant, when he said, “The one who accuses is the one who is”.

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This article was originally published on New Eastern Outlook.

Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he has worked for over 30 years on water and environment around the world. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for online journals and is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and  co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020).

He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

Featured image is from OffGuardian

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China Is Losing Patience with Washington. “You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry,” China tells Washington, and China is getting angry.

Beijing warns US and its UK, Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand puppets to give up pretending they constitute “world opinion.” See this. 

This rebuke to the “Five Eyes” follows a strong dressing down delivered by Yang Jiechi, a ruling member of the Chinese government to the Biden regime at the Alaska talks.  Yang Jiechi told the US delegation that “the United States does not have the qualification to say that it wants to speak to China from a position of strength.”  In other words, who do you think you are?  Where did you get the idea that your self-serving position constitutes international public opinion and that you can lean on us to comply with your position?

In their most recent public statements President Putin and Foreign Minister Lavrov have stopped pleading with the West to be nice.  Putin acknowledged that Washington only wants a hegemonic relationship with Russia, a relationship inconsistent with Russian sovereignty, and Lavrov said that the EU’s hostility to Russia could result in Russia breaking off relations with Europe.  

Washington is probably too arrogant to hear what it is being told.  This is why I am concerned that Washington’s hegemonic aspiration can result in a devastating war.  It is easy to rouse Americans, especially patriotic Trump supporters, against Russia and China.  The American Establishment did not allow Trump to improve relations with Russia, but it did permit him to worsen relations with China.  But what sense does it make for Trump supporters, defined by the Biden regime as “Trump insurrectionists,” “enemies of democracy,” and “America’s greatest threat,” to support the Biden’s regime’s propaganda against Russia and China?  

Washington and its presstitutes sound like a broken record with their complaints about human rights violations in China and Russia’s alleged poisoning of Navalny, Washington’s man with whom to replace Putin. Washington’s hypocrisy does not impress China and Russia.  Washington’s puppet states go along with it, but most of the world regards the US as the human rights abuser with its 20 years of destrution of Muslim countries and its evil, inhuman, and illegal treatment of Julian Assange.  Whatever human rights violations China and Russia might have committed, they pale in comparison with Washington’s enormous crimes against humanity, crimes that include protection of Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians.

The long years of Washington’s hypocrisy has, I fear, destroyed world respect for Washington’s veracity and integrity.  I am afraid that China and Russia have concluded that it is impossible to come to terms with a government whose words are limited to propaganda. The resulting Russian and Chinese lack of trust in Washington, together with Washington’s quest for hegemony, makes the danger of war high.

There doesn’t seem anything to do about this risk from within the US.  Judging from the content of most articles on Johnson’s List, a daily collection of articles about Russia, Russian studies in the US are no longer serious and consist largely of accusatory propaganda that presents Russia as Washington wants Russia presented.  

Americans do not understand the risks that Washington is taking with China and Russia, because the media do not explain the facts and the risks to them. Stephen Cohen, recently deceased, was perhaps America’s last academic Russian expert.  He and I shared the concern that Washington’s intent to damage Russia was sowing the seeds of war. For our efforts, we were labeled “Russian dupes.”  For intelligent commentary on Russia, a person turns to The Saker and Andrei Martyanov, not to university departments of Russian studies. Unfortunately for understanding, all who put truth in the way of Washington’s propaganda are dismissed as “pro-Kremlin.”

Silencing the voices of sanity is how wars come about.

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Dr. Paul Craig Roberts writes on his blog site, PCR Institute for Political Economy, where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

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This is a report by TeleSur which points to the fact that the so-called “Health Passport” is being being adopted in the EU as well as China.

The broader implications of a Health Passport as well as the issue of fundamental human rights including the right to refuse to be vaccinated is not mentioned by TeleSur.

#COVID19 | China has launched a "health passport" for citizens wishing to travel abroad, similar to initiatives emerging in the European Union and the United States to facilitate health controls across borders amidst global COVID-19 vaccination campaigns. pic.twitter.com/OmRtJ7OhWt

— teleSUR English (@telesurenglish) March 12, 2021

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There are certainly a number of reasons why the United States government is now only viewed favorably by the Israelis, but totally tone deaf foreign and economic policies have to be right up there in how the world sees Washington. Rather than conform to how other nations are expected to behave, the U.S. has elevated “exceptionalism” and “leader of the free world” nonsense to a dogma where it believes itself allowed to behave without restraint in defense of what it claims to be its interests. As all countries act in support of interests, that would at least be understandable but the odd thing is that the various constituencies that make up the U.S. government do not even have any clear vision of what is and is not good for the country and American people as a whole.

President Joe Biden’s recent labeling of Russian President Vladimir Putin as a “killer” combined with a threat to make Russia “pay a price” due to its alleged meddling in American elections is a perfect example of imperial over-reach by the clowns currently prowling the corridors of power in Washington. The not so thinly veiled threat was derived from an intelligence assessment that claimed that Russia had favored the candidacy of Donald Trump and had been circulating disinformation to damage Biden and his family. The assessment provided no evidence to back-up what was claimed, which was innocuous in any event, but it was enough to trigger a malaprop response from the U.S. president. The more canny Putin has responded by suggesting a live televised “debate” with Biden, who, refused to take up the offer, knowing that if he had he would have quite likely “gaffed” his way to incoherence.

Some other recent stories indicate both that Washington does not even know how to be nice to its friends and that the White House is hardly in control of what goes on its own doorstep. There is considerable discussion over the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline which is planned to connect Russian gas with German customers.

It would be good business for Russia and also for Germany since the gas is cheaper than other available supplies. The Trump Administration announced that it would oppose the project on “security grounds” and last week Secretary of State Tony Blinken stated that it was a bad deal because “this pipeline is a Russian geopolitical project intended to divide Europe and weaken European energy security.” He also warned that companies working on the pipeline must cease work immediately or face “harsh” U.S. sanctions. Most of the companies are Western European and nominally NATO allies of the U.S. and Nord Stream 2 will likely be completed for good economic reasons.

Washington will throw a hissy fit, in part because it wants to sell the more expensive American gas to the Germans. Biden is, for what it’s worth, continuing and doubling down on the Trump policy towards the project. It is a totally unnecessary insult to America’s European allies, has nothing to do with national security, and if Washington kills the project, it will give fuel to anti-U.S. sentiment while also serving to increase tension with Russia.

Another story that keeps popping up in the British media concerns Washington’s unwillingness to deal with a driving incident in August 2019 that killed an English teenager. The driver of the car that struck motorbiker Harry Dunn was Anne Sacoolas, a U.S. citizen, whose husband worked in an unspecified job in intelligence at RAF Croughton, an airbase in central England. She was driving her husband’s SUV on the wrong side of the road and the British police initially charged her with “causing death by dangerous driving.”

The U.S. Embassy quickly became involved, flying Sacoolas home on a military flight and reporting to the British authorities that she was protected by diplomatic immunity and would not be answerable for what had occurred. The British government and media did not agree and, in truth, Sacoolas was not necessarily covered by immunity because she was not a diplomat and was not performing any official function when the incident occurred. The British Foreign Office submitted a request for extradition so Sacoolas could face trial, but it was rejected by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

Currently the parents of Harry Dunn are suing in a Virginia court for civil damages against Sacoolas and the U.S. judge has let the case proceed. Anne Sacoolas is reportedly in hiding and has offered to do community service in the U.S. while also making a cash donation to a suitable charity in Harry’s memory.

The tale has taken an interesting turn in that it has been suggested, though not confirmed, that Anne was an intelligence officer like her husband Jonathan, which may have been the motive for removing her from England in the first place.

But the point is that Anne Sacoolas should have stayed in the UK, where she would have had a fair hearing over an incident that was ultimately an accident. Instead, the United States has chosen to play hard ball with a close ally and friend. The British public and media have not forgotten Anne Sacoolas and remain angry about how the U.S. responded to Harry’s death. It is reported that Prime Minister Boris Johnson has personally raised the issue of Sacoolas with both the Trump and Biden Administrations, stating that “We have always asked for extradition. The denial of that we have always seen as a denial of justice.” It would be the right thing to do from many perspectives to let the case be handled in British courts, but there is no sign that Washington will be accommodating.

So the beat goes on.

Anyone who expected a change in tone in foreign policy due to the transition from Trump to Biden has to be disappointed.

Insulting Russia’s leader, telling the Germans how to run their economy, and refusing a reasonable British extradition request are all in a day’s work for the White House, which appears to be oblivious to the damage that is being done to broad U.S. interests.

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Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is https://councilforthenationalinterest.orgaddress is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected]

He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

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Note: the tables from the original source are not displaying or have been removed.

All the data is indicated for Pfizer, Moderna and Astrazeneca. 3,964 Dead 162,610 Injuries:

The Breakdown:

Total reactions for the experimental vaccine AZD1222 (CHADOX1 NCOV-19) from Oxford/ AstraZeneca: 451 deaths and 54,571 injuries to 13/03/2021

Total reactions for the experimental mRNA vaccine Tozinameran (code BNT162b2, Comirnaty) from BioNTech/ Pfizer: 2,540 deaths and 102,100 injuries to 13/03/2021

Total reactions for the experimental mRNA vaccine mRNA-1273 (CX-024414) from Moderna: 973 deaths and 5,939 injuries to 13/03/2021

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The European database of suspected drug reaction reports, EudraVigilance, is now tracking reports of injuries and deaths following the experimental COVID-19 “vaccines.”

Here is what EudraVigilance states about their database:

This website was launched by the European Medicines Agency in 2012 to provide public access to reports of suspected side effects (also known as suspected adverse drug reactions). These reports are submitted electronically to EudraVigilance by national medicines regulatory authorities and by pharmaceutical companies that hold marketing authorisations (licences) for the medicines.

EudraVigilance is a system designed for collecting reports of suspected side effects. These reports are used for evaluating the benefits and risks of medicines during their development and monitoring their safety following their authorisation in the European Economic Area (EEA). EudraVigilance has been in use since December 2001.

This website was launched to comply with the EudraVigilance Access Policy, which was developed to improve public health by supporting the monitoring of the safety of medicines and to increase transparency for stakeholders, including the general public.

The Management Board of the European Medicines Agency first approved the EudraVigilance Access Policy in December 2010. A revision was adopted by the Board in December 2015 based on the 2010 pharmacovigilance legislation. The policy aims to provide stakeholders such as national medicines regulatory authorities in the EEA, the European Commission, healthcare professionals, patients and consumers, as well as the pharmaceutical industry and research organisations, with access to reports on suspected side effects.

Transparency is a key guiding principle of the Agency, and is pivotal to building trust and confidence in the regulatory process. By increasing transparency, the Agency is better able to address the growing need among stakeholders, including the general public, for access to information. (Source.)

Their report through March 13, 2021 lists 3,964 deaths and 162,610 injuries following injections of three experimental COVID-19 shots:

COVID-19 MRNA VACCINE MODERNA (CX-024414), COVID-19 MRNA VACCINE PFIZER-BIONTECH (TOZINAMERAN), and COVID-19 VACCINE ASTRAZENECA (CHADOX1 NCOV-19).

There is also data for a fourth experimental COVID “vaccine,” COVID-19 VACCINE JANSSEN (AD26.COV2.S). We have not included data from the Johnson and Johnson COVID shot in this report, but will do so in future reports.

A Health Impact News subscriber in Europe ran the reports for each of the three COVID-19 shots we are including here, and here is the summary data through March 13, 2021.

Total reactions for the experimental mRNA vaccine Tozinameran (code BNT162b2, Comirnaty) from BioNTech/ Pfizer: 2,540 deaths and 102,100 injuries to 13/03/2021

COVID-19 MRNA VACCINE PFIZER-BIONTECH (TOZINAMERAN)

• 7,604 Blood and lymphatic system disorders incl. 15 deaths
• 4,636 Cardiac disorders incl. 276 deaths
• 22 Congenital, familial and genetic disorders incl. 2 deaths
• 2,683 Ear and labyrinth disorders
• 52 Endocrine disorders
• 2,941 Eye disorders incl. 2 deaths
• 23,074 Gastrointestinal disorders incl. 125 deaths
• 72,072 General disorders and administration site conditions incl. 957 deaths
• 102 Hepatobiliary disorders incl. 12 deaths
• 1,928 Immune system disorders incl. 11 deaths
• 6,020 Infections and infestations incl. 275 deaths
• 2,198 Injury, poisoning and procedural complications incl. 32 deaths
• 4,565 Investigations incl. 111 deaths
• 1,567 Metabolism and nutrition disorders incl. 49 deaths
• 37,365 Musculoskeletal and connective tissue disorders incl. 22 deaths
• 55 Neoplasms benign, malignant and unspecified (incl cysts and polyps) incl. 3 deaths
• 44,993 Nervous system disorders incl. 185 deaths
• 81 Pregnancy, puerperium and perinatal conditions incl. 2 deaths
• 57 Product issues
• 3,742 Psychiatric disorders incl. 28 deaths
• 525 Renal and urinary disorders incl. 37 deaths
• 545 Reproductive system and breast disorders
• 8,788 Respiratory, thoracic and mediastinal disorders incl. 294 deaths
• 10,808 Skin and subcutaneous tissue disorders incl. 18 deaths
• 229 Social circumstances incl. 6 deaths
• 69 Surgical and medical procedures incl. 4 deaths
• 4,820 Vascular disorders incl. 74 deaths

Total reactions for the experimental mRNA vaccine mRNA-1273 (CX-024414) from Moderna: 973 deaths and 5,939 injuries to 13/03/2021

COVID-19 MRNA VACCINE MODERNA (CX-024414)

• 330 Blood and lymphatic system disorders incl. 9 deaths
• 501 Cardiac disorders incl. 96 deaths
• 1 Congenital, familial and genetic disorders
• 116 Ear and labyrinth disorders
• 6 Endocrine disorders
• 181 Eye disorders incl. 2 deaths
• 1,283 Gastrointestinal disorders incl. 40 deaths
• 4,198 General disorders and administration site conditions incl. 393 deaths
• 21 Hepatobiliary disorders
• 219 Immune system disorders incl. 1 death
• 515 Infections and infestations incl. 57 deaths
• 236 Injury, poisoning and procedural complications incl. 16 deaths
• 411 Investigations incl. 36 deaths
• 165 Metabolism and nutrition disorders incl. 18 deaths
• 1,727 Musculoskeletal and connective tissue disorders incl. 23 deaths
• 12 Neoplasms benign, malignant and unspecified (incl cysts and polyps) incl. 3 deaths
• 2,324 Nervous system disorders incl. 111 deaths
• 15 Pregnancy, puerperium and perinatal conditions
• 4 Product issues
• 271 Psychiatric disorders incl. 14 deaths
• 93 Renal and urinary disorders incl. 10 deaths
• 34 Reproductive system and breast disorders incl. 1 death
• 817 Respiratory, thoracic and mediastinal disorders incl. 93 deaths
• 740 Skin and subcutaneous tissue disorders incl. 11 deaths
• 48 Social circumstances incl. 3 deaths
• 40 Surgical and medical procedures incl. 4 deaths
• 368 Vascular disorders incl. 32 deaths

Total reactions for the experimental vaccine AZD1222 (CHADOX1 NCOV-19) from Oxford/ AstraZeneca: 451 deaths and 54,571 injuries to 13/03/2021

COVID-19 VACCINE ASTRAZENECA (CHADOX1 NCOV-19)

• 1,180 Blood and lymphatic system disorders incl. 11 deaths
• 2,080 Cardiac disorders incl. 63 deaths
• 17 Congenital, familial and genetic disorders
• 1,237 Ear and labyrinth disorders
• 41 Endocrine disorders
• 1,977 Eye disorders incl. 1 death
• 17,491 Gastrointestinal disorders incl. 15 deaths
• 42,367 General disorders and administration site conditions incl. 198 deaths
• 32 Hepatobiliary disorders incl. 1 death
• 578 Immune system disorders
• 3,340 Infections and infestations incl. 46 deaths
• 853 Injury, poisoning and procedural complications incl. 2 deaths
• 2,384 Investigations incl. 3 deaths
• 2,676 Metabolism and nutrition disorders incl. 5 deaths
• 22,858 Musculoskeletal and connective tissue disorders incl. 4 deaths
• 19 Neoplasms benign, malignant and unspecified (incl cysts and polyps) incl. 2 deaths
• 32,490 Nervous system disorders incl. 41 deaths
• 22 Pregnancy, puerperium and perinatal conditions
• 11 Product issues
• 3,105 Psychiatric disorders incl. 3 deaths
• 560 Renal and urinary disorders incl. 4 deaths
• 266 Reproductive system and breast disorders
• 4,293 Respiratory, thoracic and mediastinal disorders incl. 33 deaths
• 6,815 Skin and subcutaneous tissue disorders incl. 2 deaths
• 99 Social circumstances incl. 2 deaths
• 138 Surgical and medical procedures incl. 4 deaths
• 1,656 Vascular disorders incl. 11 deaths

This is public information funded by the European Medicines Agency (EMA), but it is obviously being censored by the corporate media.

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In an explosive Senate hearing on March 18, Dr. Anthony Fauci clashed with Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul over a subject that has characterized much of the White House health adviser’s recent commentary on Covid-19: the specter of reinfection, caused by one of the emerging variants of the virus.

Several recent studies suggest that both natural and vaccine-induced immunity to Covid-19 is robust at least for the medium term, and even those hinting at possible reinfections suggest it is a rare phenomenon mainly afflicting people with severely weakened immune systems.

Fauci nonetheless maintains that reinfections, particularly from the South African variant of the virus, are not only commonplace but justify maintaining a suite of restrictive nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPI) such as lockdowns, mask mandates, and social distancing regulations – perhaps even for another year.

Paul pressed Fauci to cite the scientific literature supporting this claim, to no avail. Instead, Fauci deflected the question by repeating platitudes about masks and exaggerating a recent study about reinfections. According to Fauci, previously recovered people who “were exposed to the variant in South Africa” reacted “as if they had never been infected before. They had no protection.”

A Danish study that Fauci later referenced to justify this assertion made no such claim about reinfection being widespread. Quite the contrary, its authors concluded “that protection against repeat SARS-CoV-2 infection is robust and detectable in the majority of individuals, protecting 80% or more of the naturally infected population who are younger than 65 years against reinfections.”

They did further observe “that individuals aged 65 years and older had less than 50% protection against repeat SARS-CoV-2 infection” and recommended targeted vaccinations for this group to bolster immunity. But even this finding came with several acknowledged limitations, as the study was not designed to test for repeat infection among the vast number of mild or asymptomatic cases of the disease, or to directly verify whether suspected reinfection cases were the result of misclassified lingering infections.

The study did not, however, support Fauci’s contention that reinfections are becoming commonplace.

Last week’s hearing is not the first time in recent memory that Fauci has exaggerated the evidence around reinfection, specifically invoking the South African variant. In early February, a pair of studies produced evidence that reinfections from this strain were possible, although at this point they appear to be rare. The first confirmed one single case of reinfection from the South African variant after extensive testing to rule out a misclassified lingering infection.

The second, conducted as part of the Novavax vaccine trial, indirectly inferred that a tiny number of its participants may have become reinfected with the South African variant, “suggest[ing] that prior infection with COVID-19 may not completely protect against subsequent infection by the South Africa escape variant.”

In no sense did either study claim that reinfections are commonplace or widespread. If anything, they were measured scientific calls for further investigation of each possibility. Yet here is how Fauci described them in a mid-February interview with CNN: “[t]he experience of our colleagues in South Africa indicates that even if you’ve been infected with the original virus, that there is a very high rate of re-infection to the point where previous infection does not seem to protect you against re-infection, at least with the South African variant.”

This sort of overstatement is a familiar theme for the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) lead infectious disease bureaucrat, dating all the way back to his mishandling of the AIDS crisis in the early 1980s. Fauci has a bad habit of seizing onto a small kernel of scientific data, drawing sweeping inferences upon it through unfounded speculation, and then presenting his own exaggerated spin to the public as if it is a matter of scientific fact.

Fauci’s Mutating Scientific Commentary

All the more curious, Fauci’s recent exaggerations about Covid-19 reinfection place him in direct conflict with another “expert” assessment of the very same question: his own, at various points over the course of the pandemic in the last year.

On March 28, 2020 – just shy of a year before his recent tangle with Senator Paul – Fauci aggressively contested the likelihood of reinfection in an interview with the Daily Show’s Trevor Noah. “It’s never 100%,” he explained, “but I’d be willing to bet anything that people who recover are really protected against re-infection.”

The NIH administrator’s many credulous enthusiasts in the news media will likely respond to such contradictory assertions by claiming that Fauci is simply updating his assessment in light of new evidence. Yet his track record over the past year suggests a very different story. Far from incorporating the latest scientific findings, Fauci appears to selectively invoke or downplay the specter of reinfection based on whether or not it serves his political objectives of the moment.

Fauci’s claims about reinfection do not follow a consistent trajectory of emerging evidence about whether or how frequently it happens. Instead they vacillate between depicting the possibility as either an overblown fear, concerning only a few rare cases, or an imminent cause for alarm that could spread to the entire population.

During the first several months of lockdowns in the United States, Fauci repeatedly asserted that immunity from the virus would preclude reinfection among those who had contracted the disease and recovered. “It’s a reasonable assumption that this virus is not changing very much,” he explained on an early April 2020 webcast for the Journal of the American Medical Association. “If we get infected now and it comes back next February or March we think this person is going to be protected.”

Fauci repeated a similar claim in a July 2020 interview with NIH director Francis Collins, who specifically asked him about the possibility of reinfection. “I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a rare case of an individual who went into remission and relapse,” he explained, “But Francis, I could say with confidence that it is very unlikely.”

These early statements aligned with Fauci’s political messaging in the first few months of the pandemic. He was operating under the assumption that lockdowns would successfully contain the virus, even praising Europe at the time for “successfully” pulling off this strategy (the fall second wave would belie this claim, as well as the notion that lockdowns even minimally guard against the course of the virus). If the United States would only accept similar measures through the summer and perhaps fall, the pandemic could be tamed through NPIs. Meanwhile, reinfections remained a non-issue in Fauci’s eyes.

When medical researchers documented one of the first confirmed cases of reinfection last August, Fauci saw no cause for alarm. During a virtual address to the staff of the Walter Reed Medical Center on August 26, he dismissed the prospect as “purely rare and anecdotal.” Fauci continued: “In every anecdotal case I’ve seen, there could have been another explanation for that. So, I can say that although we have to leave open the possibility, it is likely so, so rare that right now with what we know, it’s not an issue.”

Keep in mind that this description could just as easily apply to the recent studies of the South African strain, which have only confirmed or suggested a tiny number of reinfections. Fauci simply interpreted these earlier studies with greater caution and restraint against exaggerating their implications.

Not long after his August 2020 remarks, Fauci’s messaging on reinfections shifted to an opposite tack. With the looming prospect of another round of lockdowns in the fall, a group of scientists convened for a weekend meeting at AIER. On October 4^th they issued the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD), challenging the efficacy of Fauci’s lockdown-centered strategy and calling attention to the widespread collateral harms it had inflicted on society. Instead, the GBD argued, we should adopt a strategy of “focused protection” for the most vulnerable until we built up herd immunity in the general population.

Herd immunity is a biological fact rather than a policy strategy. It comes about through the combination of naturally acquired immunity from recovered persons, and vaccine-induced immunity among the still-vulnerable. With anticipated testing and approval of the first vaccines in the late fall or winter, focused protection offered a viable pathway to reopening and thereby alleviating the widespread social and economic destruction caused by the lockdowns over the last year.

Suddenly Fauci began pivoting his messaging on reinfections. Shortly after the GBD came out, White House coronavirus adviser Dr. Scott Atlas endorsed “focused protection” as an alternative to a perpetual cycle of lockdowns. Fauci himself previously conceded the reality of herd immunity effects in the spring and summer when he pointed out that reinfections were anecdotal, rare, and unlikely. But now he saw his political authority being challenged by the GBD authors and by Atlas’s parallel recommendations.

On October 16, 2020 Fauci accordingly went on CNN with a new message of alarm about reinfections: “We’re starting to see a number of cases that are being reported of people who get re-infected, well-documented cases of people who were infected after a relatively brief period of time. So you really have to be careful that you’re not completely immune.”

Fauci’s statement implied that he had access to a growing body of new evidence on reinfection. In reality, he had a textbook example of the type of case he previously characterized as “rare and anecdotal” in August when he was trying to allay fears of the same phenomenon. A few days prior to the October CNN interview, a team of researchers in the Netherlands reported a single confirmed case in which an 89-year-old patient undergoing treatment for advanced cancer had contracted the disease, recovered, and then passed away after becoming reinfected with another strain. To Fauci however, the possibility of reinfection – once dismissed as an uncommon occurrence – became a political tool to ward off the GBD’s challenge to the lockdowns.

For the next several weeks, Fauci raised the reinfection specter whenever the subject of herd immunity came up. “We have seen specific instances of re-infection, people who got infected, recovered, and got infected with another SARS Covid-2,” he claimed in a C-Span interview that aired on November 12^th. This statement came in response to questions about herd immunity from the NIH’s Francis Collins – the same person who asked a similar question in July. Recall Fauci’s answer then: “I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a rare case of an individual who went into remission and relapsed…But Francis, I could say with confidence that [re-infection] is very unlikely.”

On November 18^th Pfizer announced the successful completion of its vaccine trial and intention to seek emergency authorization from the FDA within a matter of days. Fauci, who had been deprecating the herd immunity concept and hinting at reinfection only a week prior, pivoted his messaging yet again.

In a sense, he had no other option. The central premise of vaccination is to expedite reaching herd immunity in the population. As the GBD authors noted, natural immunity among the recovered and vaccination among the still-vulnerable work in concert with each other, bringing society above the necessary threshold for population-wide herd immunity. Initially, Fauci concurred,stating in an interview on November 22^nd that “if you get an overwhelming majority of the people vaccinated with a highly efficacious vaccine, we can reasonably quickly get to the herd immunity that would be a blanket of protection for the country.

Within a matter of days, Fauci’s rhetoric shifted even further away from reinfection and toward touting the medium-term efficacy of immunity after vaccination. On November 27^th he told McClatchy News: “From what we know of the duration thus far of immunity, I would be surprised if it turns out to be a 20-year duration, but I would also be surprised if it was less than a year. I think it would probably be more than a year.” A few days later, Fauci told Fox News that the country would reach herd immunity once about 70% received the vaccine.

Then the goalposts shifted

Faced with mounting political pressures to relax lockdowns and other NPI measures in the wake of the vaccine, Fauci began casting about for new rationales to extend their duration. In a now-notorious interview with the New York Times’s Donald McNeil on December 24^th, Fauci bumped his herd immunity threshold upward toward 90%. The lower targets from the previous month, he now insisted, were part of an elaborate noble lie to coax the public into greater compliance with his own directives: “When polls said only about half of all Americans would take a vaccine, I was saying herd immunity would take 70 to 75 percent. Then, when newer surveys said 60 percent or more would take it, I thought, ‘I can nudge this up a bit,’ so I went to 80, 85.”

Throughout this period, the public discussion around Covid-19 refocused on the emergence of new variants of the disease caused by ongoing mutations of the original virus. Fauci’s messaging shifted as well, focusing again on the matter of reinfections with a clear message of downplaying the risk. That’s the argument he conveyed to California Governor Gavin Newsom in a brief webcast on December 31, 2020. The new UK variant, he insisted at the time, “doesn’t seem to evade the protection that’s afforded by the antibodies that are produced by vaccines…people who have been infected don’t seem to get reinfected by this.”

With each new strain however, Fauci’s message continued to pivot. By mid-February, as noted above, he was again raising the specter of reinfection from the new South African variant as a pretext for keeping mask mandates and social distancing requirements in place, even after vaccination. Fauci also pivoted away from setting target thresholds for herd immunity as vaccination numbers rapidly rose in the early spring. On March 15, 2021 he told a White House press conference that “We should not get so fixated on this elusive number of herd immunity” and should instead simply focus on vaccinating as many people as we can.

Fauci’s exchange with Rand Paul over the possibility of reinfections would take place later that same week, where he again engaged in unfounded speculation based on emerging evidence from the South African variant. While the aforementioned studies of this variant documented orinferred the possibility of reinfection, neither supported the claim that this was common or widespread.

Except Fauci’s depiction of them offered no such nuance. Instead, he offered Paul a sweeping generalization at the March 18, 2021 hearing. People with prior Covid-19 infection “had no protection” from the South African variant, according to Fauci. He doubled down on the exaggerated speculation the next day, telling CNN “I’m afraid, if people hear what Rand Paul says, and believe it, and you have an elderly person who has been infected, and they decide, ‘Well, Rand Paul says let’s not wear a mask,’ they won’t. They could get reinfected again and get into trouble.”

In just under a year’s time, Fauci’s messaging on reinfection and herd immunity has now mutated across dozens of variants of its own, each conveniently aligning with his political messaging of the moment. Although reinfection from new strains continues to be an avenue of research and investigation, the evidence we currently have suggests it remains uncommon. That hasn’t stopped America’s “leading infectious disease authority” from indulging in wildly irresponsible speculation from a national stage though, invariably appealing to alarmism as a pretext for continuing the same failed lockdown policies he has been peddling for over a year now.

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Phil Magness is a Senior Research Fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research. He is the author of numerous works on economic history, taxation, economic inequality, the history of slavery, and education policy in the United States.

All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

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In a “highly unusual” statement Tuesday, a U.S. health agency said AstraZeneca may have included “outdated information” in its clinical trial results, which may have led to the vaccine maker providing the public with an incomplete view of its efficacy data.

The statement by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) came less than a day after the pharmaceutical company said its vaccine was 79% effective against COVID and 100% effective against severe or critical disease and hospitalization.

“We urge the company to work with the Data and Safety Monitoring Board (DSMB) to review the efficacy data and ensure the most accurate, up-to-date efficacy data be made public as quickly as possible,” the NIAID said.

AstraZeneca immediately responded saying the numbers published Monday were based on a “pre-specified interim analysis with a data cut-off” of Feb. 17. The company promised to “immediately engage with the DSMB to share their primary analysis with the most up-to-date efficacy data” and to issue the results of the primary analysis within 48 hours.

The DSMB is an independent expert group that sees trial data before the pharmaceutical companies, the doctors running the trials or even the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), according to CNN. It has the authority to advise a company of positive interim findings or to halt a trial over safety concerns, which is what happened to AstraZeneca last September after a study participant developed neurological symptoms.

In an interview with Good Morning America, NIAID Director Dr. Anthony Fauci explained the sequence of events. Fauci said that the DSMB and AstraZeneca reviewed the trial data together before the vaccine maker issued its press release. But when AstraZeneca issued its press release, the DSMB “got concerned and wrote a rather harsh note to them and with a copy to me saying that in fact the data that was in the press release were somewhat outdated and might in fact be misleading a bit and wanted them to straighten it out.”

That’s when NIAID issued its statement advising AstraZeneca that it “better get back with the DSMB to make sure that the correct data gets put into a press release,” Fauci said. Fauci said that DSMB picking up this discrepancy is really “a safeguard.”

In a statement to the Science Media Centre in the UK, Stephen Evans, professor of pharmacoepidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said that members of the DSMB sometimes disagree with investigators over vaccine trial results, but usually in private. “So this is unprecedented in my opinion,” Evans said.

As analysts scrambled to interpret the statement, one scientist claimed the U.S. government stopped just short of accusing AstraZeneca of manipulating its trial data.

“This is a highly unusual statement by the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). It comes close to accusing Oxford/AZ of having wilfully misrepresented some results from their recent U.S. vaccine trial,” tweeted Francois Balloux, professor and director of the UCL Genetics Institute.

This is a highly unusual statement by the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). It comes close to accusing Oxford/AZ of having wilfully misrepresented some results from their recent US vaccine trial. https://t.co/cj86TYdY7e

— Prof Francois Balloux (@BallouxFrancois) March 23, 2021

According to The New York Times, companies sponsoring drug or vaccine trials typically wait for the monitoring board to review analyses and conclude that the study has yielded an answer before they announce trial results.

In recent days, the monitoring board’s analysis of the AstraZeneca trial was delayed several times because the board asked for revised reports from those handling trial data on behalf of the company. The monitoring board ultimately conveyed the results of the study to AstraZeneca in a meeting over the weekend, leading to the company’s press release Monday morning.

Dr. Eric Topol, a clinical trials expert at Scripps Research in San Diego, said it was “highly irregular” to see such a public display of friction between a monitoring board and a study sponsor. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” he told the Times after the institute’s statement was released. “It’s so, so troubling.”

According to Zero Hedge, the AstraZeneca vaccine — which is a linchpin of the World Health Organization’s effort to vaccinate poorer countries via its Bill Gates-approved COVAX initiative — once again finds itself mired in controversy. Notably, in its most recent data, AstraZeneca neglected to include key information, such as  the number of trial participants who developed “severe COVID.” AstraZeneca President Ruud Dobber, during an interview on CNBC’s Squawk Box, said the number was “5,” shortly after the data were released.

“The way they handled their data early on, AstraZeneca basically shot themselves in the foot,” Julian Tang, a virologist at the University of Leicester, said even before the latest issue arose.

AstraZeneca has received criticism over its studies since the first data released in the UK, which purported to show the vaccine was 70% effective, yet failed to account for a manufacturing mistake and didn’t include enough participants over 65 to determine efficacy among older patients, reported ZeroHedge.

European governments like Germany and France responded by initially limiting the jab to patients under the age of 65. In the U.S., officials suspended AstraZeneca’s study in 30,000 Americans for an unusual six weeks last fall, as frustrated regulators sought details about neurological problems reported in Britain.

The latest controversy comes after 20 countries suspended use of AstraZeneca last week based on reports of rare blood clots, some resulting in death, in healthy people who received the vaccine. Although The European Medicines Agency (EMA) found the Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID vaccine “may be associated with very rare cases of blood clots,” it deemed the vaccine “safe and effective” and encouraged countries to use it, The Defender reported.

Two independent research teams in Norway and Germany announced Friday they identified antibodies that provoke immune reactions leading to the type of blood clots experienced by some people who received AstraZeneca’s COVID vaccine. Although many countries resumed their vaccination program with AstraZeneca’s vaccine after the EMA’s preliminary findings, some countries, including France, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland, have not lifted their restrictions on its use, according to The British Medical Journal.

AstraZeneca said it would continue to analyze the new data and prepare to apply in the coming weeks for Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) from the FDA, reported the Times. If approved in the U.S. AstraZeneca would become the fourth available vaccine stateside, joining Moderna, Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson.

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Megan Redshaw is a freelance reporter for The Defender. She has a background in political science, a law degree and extensive training in natural health.

Featured image is from Children’s Health Defense

All Global Research articles can be read in 27 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

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On the occasion of the 45th anniversary of the military coup in Argentina this Wednesday, documents declassified by the National Security Archive (NSA) indicate that the U.S. government was aware of the plots led by coup leader Jorge Videla in 1976.

Cables signed by the former U.S. Ambassador to Argentina Robert Hill showed early meetings with coup instigator Emilio Massera who was a member of the Military Board installed on March 24, 1976.

“The embassy has already indicated discreetly and through third parties to the Military that the U.S. will recognize a new government in Argentina,” Hill wrote.

The documents also proved that the then U.S. Undersecretary of State William Rogers briefed Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and the White House National Security Council (NSC) in mid-February about the destabilization plans.

“The military government will be friendly to the U.S; however, in stepping up the fight against the guerrillas, it is almost certain they will engage in human rights violations that would generate international criticism,” Rogers stressed.

24 de Marzo Día de la Memoria, Verdad y Justicia. Hoy abrazamos a todos los que siguen buscando su identidad robada, llorando sus desaparecidos y a un pueblo entero que fue víctima de la última dictadura civico militar en Argentina. Nunca Más. pic.twitter.com/8eBZgQTgSq

— Lucía Bonifatti (@LBonifatti) March 24, 2021

The meme reads, “March 24: Day of Memory, Truth, and Justice. We embrace all those people who continue to search for their stolen identities and mourn their disappeared relatives. We recall an entire nation that was a victim of the last civic-military dictatorship. Nevermore”

Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officials accompanied by then-Republican Senator Jesse Helms visited Buenos Aires just 12 days before the coup. Cables showed Videla’s intentions to seek recommendations for handling “the public relations aspect.”

“My presence out of the country when the coup happens would, I think, be a fact in our favor indicating the non-involvement of the U.S. Embassy and the U.S. Government,” Hill warned.

The dictatorship lasted until 1983, left a toll of 30,000 disappeared people and almost 500 children with substituted identity. In 1979, a mission by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights visited Argentina where it received 5,580 complaints of kidnappings, torture, and murder.

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Featured image: The sign refers to the 30,000 people killed by the dictatorship, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2017. | Photo: EFE

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The US President Joe Biden’s “killer” remark about his “soulless” Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin was outrageous by any yardstick — even by his own long history of diplomatic gaffes. But Moscow won’t accept it as a sign of dementia. 

Moscow is certain that Biden was in full possession of his faculties and was speaking in the immediate context of two US intelligence reports — regarding foreign election interference in 2020 and Donald Trump and his supporters’ bid to exploit the ensuing discord to propagate that the election was “stolen”. 

In short, Moscow sees Biden’s remark as driven more by the exigencies of domestic politics where the Democrats are yet to consolidate their election success and demonising Russia continues to be useful. Moscow paid more attention to Biden’s subsequent remark that he could “walk and chew gum at the same time” — ie., interact with Putin whichever way he likes. 

It reflects supreme self-confidence that the US needn’t fear the consequences of its behaviour, as the Kremlin bends over backward to prevent it from spiralling into open hostility. The condescending attitude is nothing new. Former secretary of state Madeline Albright, the “godmother” of some key figures in Biden’s foreign policy team, once described the US as “the indispensable nation.” 

Hence Putin’s decision to call Biden’s bluff and invite him to come for a livestream discussion with him on the future of the US-Russia relationship. The Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said,

“Certain comments were made by Mr. Biden, and these remarks are quite unprecedented, so in order not to let these statements harm bilateral Russian-American relations, which are already in a deplorable state, President Putin suggested discussing the situation but doing so openly.” 

He added with a straight face,

“Since Biden’s remarks themselves were quite unprecedented, then it’s not possible to rule out unprecedented modes of communication.”

Indeed, for a couple of days, Biden seemed pondering over Putin’s proposition, even hinting Friday that “I’m sure we’ll talk at some point.” But the Russian Foreign Ministry confirmed on Monday that the White House finally decided to turn down Putin’s taunting invite. 

“One more opportunity has been missed to find a way out of the deadlock in Russian-US relations created through the fault of Washington. Responsibility for this lies entirely with the United States,” it said.

To be sure, the Russian-American relations are entering a new phase, thanks to Biden’s intemperate remark. Washington may not enjoy in future the latitude to “walk and chew gum” same time. 

The point is, Biden’s behaviour highlighted that in comparison with the highly-structured Soviet-American confrontation where both sides took each other most seriously, the US attitude in the recent years acquired an air of flippancy, lacking interest to take responsibility for words or actions, leave alone in producing any new constructive bilateral agenda for the relationship — and even not to jeopardise the global strategic stability. 

By a curious coincidence, Beijing has also shifted to a somewhat similar frame of mind lately. In fact, Putin spoke on the same day that Yang Jiechi, Politburo member and director of the Central Foreign Affairs Commission Office of the Chinese Communist Party, also emphasised at the talks in Alaska with top American diplomats that Beijing will do no matter what it takes to resist US bullying and interference in China’s internal affairs and safeguard its core interests. (See my blog Talks in Alaska can be transformative for US-China ties)

It is entirely conceivable that Moscow and Beijing have been exchanging notes before concluding that the Biden Administration is setting a trajectory for its Russia-China diplomacy principally with an eye on the domestic audience. From a foreign policy perspective, Biden’s team is holding a weak hand. The US’ political economy is in serious disarray and disrepair and Trump left America adrift like a beached whale. On the other hand, the burning desire to pitch for global hegemony — matched, equally, by the seething fury and despair that China is set to overtake it shortly — has gotten the better of rational thinking. 

The talks in Alaska signalled a historic shift in Chinese attitudes, summed up neatly in those three resounding sentences from Yang —

“So let me say here that, in front of the Chinese side, the United States does not have the qualification to say that it wants to speak to China from a position of strength. The U.S. side was not even qualified to say such things even 20 years or 30 years back, because this is not the way to deal with the Chinese people. If the United States wants to deal properly with the Chinese side, then let’s follow the necessary protocols and do things the right way.” 

To be sure, the meeting between China’s State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi and the visiting Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in Guilin City on March 22-23 underscored beyond doubt that the Biden administration’s dual containment strategy has boomeranged. The Chinese press release (here) signals that joint resistance to the US’ pressure tactic and countermeasures will henceforth be the leitmotif of the Sino-Russian strategic coordination. This marks a qualitatively shift toward overt strategic coordination to “firmly fight back” against perceived US attempts to threaten the “the security of their own governments and systems…, their legitimate rights and common interests… (and) stability in the areas around the two countries.” 

Lavrov’s trip aimed to boost strategic coordination with China, but Moscow does not aim to turn the US into a permanent enemy. Moscow and Beijing share the perspective that Biden’s policies are tougher than Trump’s. China, in particular, had hopes that Biden will act more reasonably but these hopes have been dashed, so China is trying to find other ways to strengthen its position — the strategic coordination with Russia forms part of it. As for Russia, it tried to turn Biden’s “killer” remark around to create a setting for engagement between Putin and Biden. 

Biden’s domestic compulsions are real. Thus, even as Secretary of State Antony Blinken left for the NATO foreign ministers meeting in Brussels (March 23-24), he got a written reminder from two powerful Democratic senators — Sen. Bob Menendez, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Sen.  Jeanne Shaheen, Subcommittee Chairman for the Subcommittee on Europe and Regional Security Cooperation — to “accelerate the process of building new sanctions packages” apropos the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline project between Russia and Germany. The senators urged Blinken “to use all the tools available to stop the pipeline’s construction.” 

On the contrary, both Russia and China would prefer that the US returns to the path of mutual respect and diplomacy. Indeed, the setting up of a US-China working group on climate change heralds the arrival of John Kerry on the scene. As for the Kremlin, it is quietly pleased that amidst all the sound and fury over the “killer” remark, the US-Russia consultations on space security went through as planned on Tuesday. Peskov reiterated that the Kremlin valued the cooperation with the US in outer space and hoped for its continuation. 

In some ways, arguably, the  theatrical developments also work fine for the Kremlin. Interestingly, Russia’s State Duma (parliament) passed legislation today allowing Putin to run for president for two more 6-year terms after the present term ends in 2024 — effectively until 2036. No doubt, the Russian public will accept the need of continuity in Kremlin leadership in such times of trouble. 

Beijing cannot but be aware of the Russian paradigm. The red line for Russia and China is that the US seeks regime change through colour revolutions. Hence their determination to pool efforts and work together to counter US hegemony and reshape the international political system based on the principle of equality. Trust Biden to respond. 

Certainly, it was no coincidence that the White House decision carrying the imprimatur of Biden to restore the Minsk embassy to ambassadorial level — signifying the summary denouement to an attempted colour revolution that Moscow countered with extraordinary grit and doggedness  — was transmitted to the Belarus foreign minister on March 22 soon after Blinken’s return from Alaska. Clearly, Biden’s diplomatic experience is not to be doubted. 

Both Russia and China estimate that the US plan to encircle them by deploying an alliance system is doomed to fail and realism will dawn sooner or later. They are convinced that they are on the right side of history. 

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Featured image: State Councilor & Foreign Minister Wang Yi (second from right) and Russian FM Sergey Lavrov (L) held talks in Guilin, March 23, 2021 (Source: Indian Punchline)